Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

by Michael D. Snediker

Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement. Through fresh, perceptive, and sensitive readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop, Snediker reveals that each of these poets demonstrated an interest in the durability of positive affects. Dickinson, Snediker argues, expresses joy and grace as much as pain and loss, and the myriad cryptic smiles in Hart Crane's White Building contradict prevailing narratives of Crane's apocryphal literary failures and eventual suicide. Snediker's ambitious and sophisticated study, informed by thinkers such as Winnicott, Deleuze, and de Man, both supplements and challenges the work of queer theory's leading figures, including Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Queer Optimism revises our understanding of queer love and affiliation, examining Spicer's serial collusion with matinee idol Billy the Kid as well as the critically neglected force of Bishop's epistolary and poetic reparations of the drowned figure of Hart Crane. In doing so, Snediker persuasively reconceives a theoretical field of optimism that was previously unavailable to scrupulous critical inquiry and provides a groundbreaking approach to modern American poetry and poetics.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Theory, Research

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I studied with Mr. Snediker several years ago in an American literature course. He's brilliant, and this is viewed as a significant book for queer theory. I respect and appreciate his readings and insights into Emily Dickinson:: few before him had given me such insight into the genre and era-stretching influence and power of her poetry. She was a fantastic writer, and Snediker does her great justice. I am glad that he was able to infuse his own personal dealings and experiences into a book that tries to regenerate queer theory from the fragmentation and self-shattering that permeates it.

I look forward to his book on Disability Theory that has not yet been released, but is forthcoming.

[Mills College Library]

811.009 S6712 2009