Leo Bersani

Queer Theory and Beyond

Edited by Mikko Tuhkanen

Subjects: Literary Theory, Queer Studies
Paperback : 9781438454108, 322 pages, July 2015
Hardcover : 9781438454115, 322 pages, December 2014

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond
Mikko Tuhkanen
Part I: Queer

1. Bersani on Location
Heather Love
2. Embarrassment and the Forms of Redemption
David Kurnick
3. Queer Betrayals
Jack Halbstam
Part II: Psychoanalytic
4. Cinema a tergo: Shooting in Elephant
Ellis Hanson
5. Reading Freud: Bersani and Lacan
James Penney
6. Addressing Oneself: Bersani and the Form/Fold of Self-Relation
Patrick ffrench
7. Monadological Psychoanalysis: Bersani, Laplanche, Beckett
Mikko Tuhkanen
Part III: Aesthetic
8. Is the Rectangle a Grave?
Michael D. Snediker
9. Proust, Shattering: Aesthetic Subjects and Metonymies of Desire
E. L. McCallum

10. A Future for Henry James
David McWhirter
11. Extreme Style: Firbank, Faulkner, and Perspectives on Modern Traditions
Kevin Ohi
Part IV: Interview

12. Rigorously Speculating: An Interview with Leo Bersani
Mikko Tuhkanen
Contributors
Index

Examines the importance of Leo Bersani’s work for queer theory, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, and film studies.

Description

For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani's writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and visual studies. This is the first book-length collection on this important author. The book's extensive introduction outlines in detail Bersani's oeuvre, particularly its place in queer thought and his complicated relationships with the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis. The subsequent contributions by notable scholars in various fields demonstrate the richness and open-endedness of his work. The book concludes with a new interview with Bersani.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright and the coeditor (with E. L. McCallum) of Queer Times, Queer Becomings, both also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"Leo Bersani is filled with erudite, beautifully written, provocative essays that make abundantly clear not only the trajectory and importance of Bersani's work, but the many ideas that work enables." — Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

"These stellar essays offer up important and unsettling insights into one of our most fearless thinkers. Thanks to this collection's extensive engagements with his body of knowledge, scholars are now able to approach Leo Bersani's prose—in all of its shattering beauty—in a dazzling new light." — Scott Herring, author of Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism