Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Later, working in the human sexuality library at Cornell, I became interested in the ways that lesbian and. I'd been working as a reporter at Gay Community News, in Boston, where I'd been writing about what turned out to be the heyday of ACT UP's activism this kept in my mind the idea that the "subjecthood" of social movements was at least as interesting as the vicissitudes of the individual, not least because of the ways that social movements could generate very mobile and responsive kinds of collectivity to meet assault and crisis. I came to graduate school at Cornell in the early 1990s, the moment of the rise of queer theory in the academy. So we must take seriously temporality's tremendous social and political force.Ĭhristopher Nealon: My book is Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke University Press, 2001). But the condition of heterogeneous temporalities can be exploited for destruction as well as expansion: Ernst Bloch recounts chillingly the Nazis' deployment of temporal asynchrony in recruiting Germans who felt backward in the face of an alien modernity. Postcolonial historians have been most influential in this process, and the turn toward temporality has been thrilling: it opens the way for other modes of consciousness to be considered seriously-those of ghosts, for example, and mystics. This refusal of linear historicism has freed me to think further about multiple temporalities in the present. I focused on the possibility of touching across time, collapsing time through affective contact between marginalized people now and then, and I suggested that with such queer historical touches we could form communities across time. I was again trying to negotiate between alteritists (social constructionists) and those who appealed to transhistorical constants of some sort (essentialists), but this time in my analyses I found that even Foucault, the inspiration of social constructionists, connected affectively with the past. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Duke University Press, 1999), was my attempt to deal directly with such desire-a queer desire for history. But I had also stowed away, not just as scholarly resource but also as token of affirmation and desire, Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which I-a lesbian graduate student in that desert of normativity, Princeton-had bought as soon as it came out. My dissertation was basically an agon played out between these two positions by the time of my first book I had developed a moderate historicist view of the past that allowed for connections with the present via discursive traditions like gender. "Obsessed" is more like it, really: I felt caught between the scholarly imperative, especially keen at Princeton, to view the past as other and my sense that present concerns could usefully illuminate the past for us now. What scholarly, activist, personal, political, or other concerns motivated the turn toward time for you? What does this turn seem to open up conceptually, institutionally, politically, or otherwise? Does it threaten to limit or shut down particular kinds of analysis or possibilities for social change?Ĭarolyn Dinshaw: Working primarily on a period in the distant past-the Middle Ages-I have been concerned since day one of graduate school with the relationship of past to present. While Wordsworth’s sibling speakers reflect historical realities of family systems during the late eighteenth century, I demonstrate how these poeticized siblings also reverberate with contemporary notions of queer temporality, as they embody Wordsworth’s consciousness of an interdependent past, present, and future.Įlizabeth Freeman: To begin with, I'd like to ask how and why the rubric of temporality (however you understand that) became important to your thinking as a queer theorist. Such sibling inter-subjectivity, this piece argues, proves to be far more integral to Wordsworth’s poetic identity than occasional references to his sister Dorothy have otherwise implied. Focusing on sibling-oriented works across Lyrical Ballads, including “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” and “We are Seven,” I consider how the poet’s vision of selfhood extends beyond an inclusive, solitary “egotistical sublime” to incorporate, instead, a multi-dimensional sense of interconnectedness with others. This essay proposes that the logic of sibling kinship-in particular, siblinghood’s inter-subjective, networked, and horizontal forms of relationality-enhances our understanding of William Wordsworth’s poetic subject.
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