Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration

ISBN-13: 9780415790079 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 222 str.

Wayne Koestenbaum

Opis

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent.

Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores – works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry – emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

Spis treści

Interpreting Double Talk: An Introduction.  Part 1. Men of Science  1. Privileging the Anus: Anna O. and the Collaborative Origin of Psychoanalysis  2. Unlocking Symonds: Sexual Inversion  Part 2. Poetic Partnerships  3. The Marinere Hath His Will(iam): Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads  4. The Waste Land: T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s Collaboration on Hysteria  Part 3. The Hour of Double Talk  5. Manuscript Affairs: Collaborative Romances of the Fin de Siècle

O autorze

Wayne Koestenbaum