Dead Letters Sent
Queer Literary Transmission
By exploring how transmission of a minority sexual culture is intertwined with the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, Dead Letters Sent builds a persuasive argument for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study.
In this remarkable work, Kevin Ohi makes an extraordinarily compelling account of the queer ways that beauty, bodies, and desires circulate and continue to ‘live on’ as literary texts. Dead Letters Sent makes clear that Ohi has become one of the most accomplished, and one of the most ‘transmissive,’ literary critics of his generation.
Michael Moon, Emory University
Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” Such scenes, however, do not so much concede the impossibility of survival as look into what constitutes literary knowledge and whether it can properly be said to be an object to be transmitted, preserved, or lost.
Beginning with general questions of transmission—the conveying of knowledge in pedagogy, the transmission and material preservation of texts and forms of knowledge, and even the impalpable communication between text and reader—Dead Letters Sent examines two senses of “queer transmission.” First, it studies the transmission of a minority sexual culture, of queer ways of life and the specialized knowledges they foster. Second, it examines the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, the queerness that is sheltered within tradition. By exploring how these two senses are intertwined, it builds a persuasive argument for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study. Its detailed attention to works by Plato, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, James, and Faulkner seeks to formulate a practice of reading adequate to the queerness Ohi’s book uncovers within the literary tradition.
Ohi identifies a radical new future for both queer theory and close reading: the possibility that each might exceed itself in merging with the other, creating a queer theory of literary tradition immanent in an immersed practice of reading.
In this remarkable work, Kevin Ohi makes an extraordinarily compelling account of the queer ways that beauty, bodies, and desires circulate and continue to ‘live on’ as literary texts. Dead Letters Sent makes clear that Ohi has become one of the most accomplished, and one of the most ‘transmissive,’ literary critics of his generation.
Michael Moon, Emory University
While many queer theorists attest to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influence on their work, Kevin Ohi’s book truly expands the reflective practice of queer pedagogy. This is a beautifully written book.
Nicholas de Villiers, author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol
Dead Letters Sent is itself a model of queer transmission, one that may well inspire and inform future work in literary studies.
American Literary History
Ohi’s careful attention to his primary texts offers many rewards.
Modern Philology
Contents
Introduction
Part I
1. Queer Transmission and the Symposium: Insult, Gay Suicide, and the Staggered Temporalities of Consciousness
2. Forgetting The Tempest
Part II
3. Tradition in Fragments: Swinburne’s “Anactoria”
4. Queer Atavism and Pater’s Aesthetic Sensibility: “Hippolytus Veiled” and “The Child in the House”
Part III
5. “That Strange Mimicry of Life by the Living”: Queer Reading in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”
6. Erotic Bafflement and the Lesson of Oscar Wilde: De Profundis
Part IV
7. Lessons of the Master: Henry James’s Queer Pedagogy
8. The Beast’s Storied End
Part V
9. “My Spirit’s Posthumeity” and the Sleeper’s Outflung Hand: Queer Transmission in Absalom, Absalom!
10. “Vanished but Not Gone, Fixed and Held in the Annealing Dust”: Initiations and Endings in Go Down, Moses
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
