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Fragmentary Literature and Queer Politics

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Fragmentary Literature and Queer Politics SOME OF THE PARTS: FRAGMENTARY LITERATURE AND QUEER POLITICS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jacob Benjamin Brogan January 2015 © 2015 Jacob Benjamin Brogan SOME OF THE PARTS: FRAGMENTARY LITERATURE AND QUEER POLITICS Jacob Benjamin Brogan Cornell University January 2015 Investigating the interplay of textual form and conceptual problems, “Some of the Parts” studies the strategic use of fragmentary literary styles by queer novelists over much of the past century, focusing especially on the connection between formal deviance and sexual difference. These works are “fragmentary” in that they deliberately foreground their own incompleteness, calling constant attention to their refusal to tell full and final stories. To the extent that they dramatize the fundamental lack of a text, fragments become a powerful means of imagining the mechanisms of desire and the denial thereof. In the process, fragmentation offers a paradoxical resource to queer authors, one that allows them to explore political, social, and even biomedical problems that would otherwise be overwhelming in scope. On the one hand, the shattered worlds that these authors summon up mirror the fraught contours of queer life and experience. Simultaneously, fragmentation serves as a tool that enables richer encounters with the very ills it diagnoses. The first chapter provides a broad overview of the ways fragmentation has been understood and put to work in the past. The second chapter, which attends to the memoiristic writings of Gertrude Stein, tackles a long running critical tradition that castigates Stein for her failure to identify herself as a lesbian, an absence that is ultimately but one point of fragmentation among many in her work. The third chapter looks at the ways William S. Burroughs repurposed bits and pieces of his early pulp accounts of gay life in his later work. This method allows him to undermine the otherwise intractable stability of the categories he had reluctantly embraced earlier in his career. The fourth chapter explores the long-term usefulness of this approach by turning to the queer, African- American science fiction novelist Samuel R. Delany, who, in The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, his 1984 novel of the AIDS crisis, embraces a multigeneric style in order to confront an otherwise incomprehensible challenge to queer existence. The final chapter of this project turns to the early 21st century novels of David Markson, in which fragmentation provides a means of negotiating the persistent pressures of the closet. Ultimately, the conclusions shows how fragmentary logics offer new means of thinking about problems of causality, arguing that such an approach is necessary as queer studies moves forward. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jacob Brogan received a BA in religious studies from Yale University in 2005. He completed his MA and PhD in English literature at Cornell University. iii For C.P., without whom… iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Every gesture of gratitude is freighted with its own incompleteness. To thank some is, inevitably, to forget others. If I have hesitated to begin these words, and I have, it is for fear of falling into the very fragmentation I attempt to chart in the pages that follow. I can hope only that in acknowledging that all acknowledgements are partial these few paragraphs can point to a whole of whose contours they are no more than a solitary edge. I am grateful most of all to my many fellow students in Cornell University’s graduate programs in the humanities. Pursuing a PhD can be alienating, all the more so in an often isolated town like Ithaca. Nevertheless, the community built by my fellow students ensured that I never felt alone and that, moreover, I always had intellectual resources aplenty as I worked to develop my own thinking and scholarship. This sense of community was most clearly manifest in Cornell’s vibrant reading group culture, with its sometimes baffling, but always exciting, fusion of the social and the scholarly. In these groups, I both encountered the ideas that helped me begin my own project and found friends who encouraged its development. In particular, the Theory Reading Group provided a critical foundation for much of my work both in and beyond my dissertation. TRG’s many members, including Aaron Hodges, Tatiana Sverjensky, Bradley Depew, Rob Lehman, Sarah Pickle, and Audrey Wasser gave me both the opportunity to grow and a rich set of models for my own critical practice. Likewise, the Gender and Sexuality Reading Group, and members such as Corinna Lee, Avery Slater, and Lynne Stahl, helped me test the limits of my project’s queer dimensions. I am equally thankful to the numerous others who participated in these groups’ regular meetings, especially those who I mention in other capacities below. Other friends and colleagues provided far reaching forms of support. Ryan Dirks and Seth Perlow served as both sounding boards as I wrote and co-conspirators in times of leisure. Sarah Ensor, Cecily Swanson, and Ingrid Diran were variously writing partners and constant companions throughout our long processes. Cecily also first introduced me to several of the texts I discuss here v and helped me immeasurably as I thought through them. Caetlin Benson-Allott provided endless professional and personal support both in graduate school and its immediate wake. Jess Keiser knows what he did: Always more than more than enough. To be sure, this project benefited from these and other friends, but I too would be less than I am today were it not for their presence in my life. Naturally, I am also deeply indebted to my special committee. Ellis Hanson, my chair, offered more than knowledge. Under his guidance, I became a clearer writer, a better thinker, and a more passionate teacher. From him, I learned a lasting lesson in the productive powers of negativity, a lesson that resonates in everything I do today. Without Kevin Attell’s wry humor and radiant sense of calm, this project might never have come to a close. Amy Villarejo’s encouragement and kindness provided me with both direction and focus. And Jonathan Culler’s sweeping scholarship and teaching provided me with the foundations for much of what I accomplished at Cornell. Other professors too numerous to name contributed to this project in ways great and small. My work at Cornell would have also been impossible without the tireless work and support of numerous administrators. In the department of English, Michele Mannella helped keep me on track throughout my degree program up to its conclusion. I could never have reached this stage without her. At the Society for the Humanities, Mary Ahl provided wisdom and kindness. In Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies, Hope Mandeville and Monica Burke helped me to find teaching and preserved my sanity. I owe more to these and many other individuals than they could possibly realize. Members of my family, especially Karyle Butcher and my mother Deborah Jacobs helped ground me throughout this process. In particular, though, I am endlessly thankful to Celeste Pietrusza, this work’s dedicatee. Every partnership is an exercise in collective cultivation, and everything I do I do on the terrain we tilled together. I finished the body of this project in a Pittsburgh cigar shop. We leave behind us ashes and smoke, but smoke dances as it mingles with other air and ashes lend texture to new earth. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Queer Fragments Chapter One 20 Fragmentary History/Histories of Fragmentation Chapter Two 48 Gertrude Stein’s Silences Chapter Three 106 William S. Burroughs’ Fragmentary Incorporations Chapter Four 155 Samuel R. Delany’s Paraliterary Optometry Chapter Five 187 David Markson’s Prison-House of Judgment Conclusion 223 Causally Queer Bibliography 258 vii INTRODUCTION Queer Fragments This project argues that fragmentary literature serves as a means of investigating otherwise inaccessible notions of significance, relation, and value. Seeking a way to understand the discontinuities and multiplicities of queer politics in the 20th and 21st centuries, it turns American novels of the past one hundred years that foreground their own incompleteness. Within these works, every individual fragment tends to assert its ability to speak for the whole, as the isolation of each part allows the fragment to declare its independent status. In turn, the movement from one fragment to the next perpetually challenges these assertions of certitude. Expanding on the work of scholars like Leonard Barkan, I identify this process as the basic grammar of fragmentation, a principle that I study in the works of Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, and David Markson. The queer fragmentary aesthetics that define these 20th and 21st century texts allow them to tarry with claims to absolute and definite meaning, even as they encourage their readers to chart larger narratives about the way such claims are constructed, underwritten, and ultimately undone. This logic enables prose stylists to explore questions of value – economic, aesthetic, and even moral – in a way that turns fragmentation into a powerful resource for queer art and politics. The deliberate embrace of fragmentation serves to mirror the more properly accidental incompleteness of queer works whose authors were silenced by oppression, self-hatred, or death. Further, it becomes a means of both complicating and correcting the gaps, elisions, and fissures that run through queer historiography. 1 There is nothing fundamentally queer about fragmentation or its literary deployments. Indeed, as scholars like Linda Nochlin have argued, fragmentation may be endemic not just to modernity as such, not just to particular artistic movements, such as German romanticism. To the extent that, pace Foucault’s famous formulation, the homosexual as species is a relatively recent invention, all attempts to represent or speak for a queer subject position necessarily emerge within this climate.
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