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No description available.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, early modern metaphysical literature has been interpreted as an upholder of traditional morals and cosmic unity. By re-examining the early critical reception of these works in connection with current theories of cultural reproduction, we can develop a new understanding of how metaphysicality undermines, in particular, an ideology of "natural" desire and identity. Focussing on desire, metaphysical authors produce a dissident knowledge of the cultural contingencies of normative thought, identity, and behaviour. Taking a philosophical approach to the subject, Edward Herbert reveals the impact of personal desires on the development of mental concepts. Christopher Marlowe, meanwhile, demonstrates the way definitions of natural gender identity inhibit sexual expression between men. Elaborating on women's same-sex desire, John Donne and Andrew Marvell contest heteronormative narratives of growth, while Aemilia Lanyer offers a vision of love between women as a homoerotic state of grace and alternative to men's violence. In his thoughts on martyrdom and political allegiance, Donne denaturalizes absolute authority and carves a space for liberty of conscience, an endeavour that corresponds to the desire for personal freedom that each of the other writers also expresses.

Thesis (Doctoral)--Université Paris III-Sorbonne nouvelle, discipline littérature et civilisation françaises, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Doctoral)--Université Paris III-Sorbonne nouvelle, discipline littérature et civilisation françaises, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Diplôme d'études approfondies, Université d'Alger, Institut des Langues étrangères, 1980. / Cover title. Reproduction of typescript. Includes title-page with Arabic title (romanized) : Fiḥalah fi ash-sharq and summary in Arabic. Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-260).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-231).

How do Victorian novels, those detailed imaginative records of psychic interiority and social life, put into language the aspect of our interior lives that seems most stubbornly nonlinguistic: that is, the insistent claims and impulses of erotic desire? If Victorian culture valued reason and accountability over sheer erotic fulfillment, and at the same time represented love and desire as important social experiences, then how did the Victorian novel represent the process of reasoning about desire without diluting its intensity or making it mechanical? In "Bad Logic," I argue that a surprising array of novelists, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James, registered the troublesome opacity of erotic life by experimenting with forms of "bad logic," from hasty conclusions to contradictions to tautologies, and finally to the ethical and erotic possibilities of vagueness. These forms bring into view the limitations of logic as a rubric for moral accountability, while at the same time they work as ironic and tacit ways of speaking and thinking about erotic desire. In other words, in the Victorian novel, the singular, embodied feelings of erotic life are imagined not as ineffable, nonsocial, or fully beyond the explanatory powers of logic and the rational mind. Rather, erotic desires represent a profound depth of psychic and affective life that, even in its resistance to sound propositional language, wants to be understood. The resurgence of interest in theories of logic in nineteenth-century England was in fact intimately related to the philosophical problem of the deep, idiosyncratic self that seems to exceed scientific knowledge about thought and its structures, but which nonetheless guides so much of psychic, ethical, and erotic life. Philosophers and social critics as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, George Boole, and George Eliot took up the stubborn problem of logic and its complex relationship to character. But it was the realist novel, I argue, that allowed for the fullest development of this problem through its own strategies for developing fictional character and representing the fullness of psychic and affective life and its often difficult social expression. That the Victorians talked and wrote endlessly about sex and sexuality, in a variety of medical, scientific, sociological, and psychological vocabularies, has been taken for granted since Foucault provided us with our most enduring account of the Victorian "logic of sex." With "Bad Logic," I enter into an ongoing reappraisal of Foucault's influence on the study of sexuality by suggesting that the Victorian impulse toward talking about and representing sexuality and desire may have had a more complex rationale than a utilitarian desire to manage and regulate sexual behaviors. Foucault's late work turned to sexual practice or ethos as a potentially utopian alternative to the "discourse" of sexuality, and yet I argue that novelistic representations of eroticism in language can extend well beyond issues of social power and regulation. Rather, they insist upon the ethical significance of erotic life and upon the importance of balancing the imperatives of rationality against the imperatives of idiosyncrasy. They take seriously, in other words, the difficulties of registering the impulses of the body in language. In addition, "Bad Logic" takes a new approach to a very old question in the study of the novel: how does this genre balance idiosyncrasy with social compromise, or assimilate the individual consciousness to the historically specific social pressures that necessarily shape it? Many critics have answered this question either by detailing the ways in which the novel form itself habituates the individual to ideology (Bersani, Armstrong, D. A. Miller), or on the other hand by showing that some normative models of social intelligibility, such as the liberal ideal of detachment or the ethical ideal of perfectionism, are not incompatible with a powerful model of individual agency (Anderson, Hadley, A. Miller). In "Bad Logic," I propose that in the Victorian novel, even the opacity of erotic life finds its way into models of sociability. Moreover, I show that novelists struggle to make their theories of ethical responsibility capacious enough to accommodate the insistent pressure of erotic desire as it tries to make itself heard.

This dissertation rethinks the category of queer desire in early modern drama and early colonial travel narratives. Moving beyond previous scholarship which has conceived of early modern sexuality chiefly in terms of same-sex erotic acts, proto-homosexual identities, or homosocial relations, this dissertation describes new forms of heightened erotic feeling which are qualitatively queer in how they depart from conventional or expected trajectories, and not because of the genders of lover and love object. Each chapter considers an iconic scene in early modern literature, and draws out a specific, recurring affective mode - paranoid suspicion, willing instrumentality, inexhaustible fancy, and colonial melancholia -- which I argue constitutes a queer form of desiring. Chapter 1 argues that both a witch trial pamphlet, Newes from Scotland (1591), and a witch trial play, The Witch of Edmonton (1621) exemplify the violent, projective cycle of paranoid suspicion by which the witch trial defines a witch according to his or her secret, deviant desires. Chapter 2 focuses on cross-dressed figures who are willingly instrumentalized as erotic facilitators in two comedies, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's Philaster (1609) and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl (1611), arguing that "being used" makes the go-between an integral part of an ostensibly heterosexual relationship, transforming it into a queer triad. Chapter 3 takes up the promiscuous desire for too many objects in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1602) and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614). I read these very different comedies as both propelled by impossible-to-satisfy hunger, and trace the etymology of the concept of "fancy" to show how desire for pleasurable and beautiful things became characterized as a queer desire for improper and unproductive commodities. Chapter 4 moves into the New World, analyzing two accounts of failed colonialism: Thomas Harriot and John White's reports from the English expeditions on Roanoke Island (1590); and Jean de Léry’s memoir of the short-lived French colony in Brazil (1578). In these texts I uncover a distinctly melancholic and queer mode of colonial desire: one predicated on impossible longing, renunciation, and haunting, thwarted identification with lost native American "others."

The Phaedra and Hippolytus myth is a frequently dramatized narrative of uncontrollable desire. This thesis examines two versions, Euripides' Hippolytus, first presented in 428 B.C. as part of the Athenian festival of Dionysus, and Sarah Kane's 1996 play, Phaedra's Love, first presented as part of the Gate Theatre of London's "new playwrights, ancient sources" series. In each play, Phaedra's desire is constructed according to sociohistorical conditions which are temporary in their cultural significance. Once the moment of creation has passed, so have the conditions in which each version of desire is originally understood. However, these constructions of Phaedra's desire also bear a simultaneously transhistorical quality as they complicate human notions of agency. In the West, therefore, Phaedra's desire is represented as a tragically constructed emotion. This thesis posits desire as transhistorically relevant in its ability to question modes of human subjectivity.