Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust

by Colleen Lamos

This original study reevaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. Colleen Lamos' analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts, concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality, which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole, gender categories, and the relation between errant sexuality and literary "mistakes."

Genres: Literary Criticism

280 pages, Paperback

First published December 9, 1994

Reviews

[twrctdrv · Rating 3 out of 5]

[whew, first review for this book on here. kinda scary. a lot of responsibility. here we go:]

Lamos' main/most interesting theory is that authors express more through the errors in their works than in their intentions. This, I should say, is a very cool idea. Despite the idea's obvious issues (a big one being that it takes any power of communication away from the author and gives it all to the critic--in other words, it's the ultimate critical power play, a declaration of "I own the text and I will do what I want with it"--not necessarily horrendous, but a bit myopic), Lamos makes it clear over the course of the book that this critical strategy can hold up a critique on its own.

This strategy is used best on Proust: to summarize, ISOLT's narrator has the notable ability to see into the thoughts of all of his characters, reporting their thoughts before death, for example, but this omniscience does not spread to Albertine, on whom countless pages are written without a glimpse of internality. Thus we can see Albertine's secret world of lesbianism and the narrators exclusion from it is an important focus of the novel. And this is true, whether you attribute it to unintentional error or Proust overtly expressing the unavailability of Albertine's interiority to him. (I don't think Lamos worries about this distinction at all: an error is an error, intentional or not.)

Also interesting is the section on Ulysses, in large part because the unavoidable errors of Ulysses interest me.

As a final note, this critical move I'm detailing here really isnt a focus of the book. Sexuality is, especially as shown through this theory. And on that subject the book's pretty solid. I just got off on a tangent and went with it.

[Linde · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read the chapter on Joyce. Though I am interested to read more on Proust and Eliot at some point, as Joyce is the focal point of my research there is no point of me reading the other two chapters at the present.

Lamos focuses on aspects of (hidden) homosexuality in Ulysses. As I was hoping to find more on the late nineteenth / early twentieth century ideal of masculinity instead I was somewhat disappointed.