Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Autor Kate McCulloughen Limba Engleză Hardback – 22 noi 2024
Queer futures begin with the body. In Never on Time, Always in Time, Kate McCullough explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. The author discusses how narrative form and techniques represent the senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. Can queer futures contain the utopic, while also addressing the violence of the past and present? McCullough argues that a narratology that incorporates the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time, which in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends on a rendering of the senses. Never on Time, Always in Time looks at works by Monique Truong, Carol Rivka Brunt, Mia McKenzie, and Alison Bechdel to explore how they invoke the senses to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable. McCullough thus reveals a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. She calls this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium” and argues that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives onto history, futurity, and relationality.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215777
ISBN-10: 0814215777
Pagini: 258
Ilustrații: 3 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
ISBN-10: 0814215777
Pagini: 258
Ilustrații: 3 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Recenzii
“Never on Time, Always in Time is a groundbreaking work in narrative theory. It accomplishes a queer narratology that clearly and coherently connects specific narrative devices with such major concerns of queer theory as temporality, futurity, materiality, affect, and anti-heteronormative resistance. A transformative work.” —Robyn Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions
Notă biografică
Kate McCullough is Associate Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885–1914.
Extras
Queer futures begin with the body. In this book, I explore how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. I am interested in how narrative form and techniques represent queer senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. How do writers use the senses to invoke the immediate, the physical, the material—the body itself—and to envision a less concrete, more abstract and variegated temporality? Can queer futures contain the utopic while also addressing the violence of the past and present? I argue that a queer narratology grounded in the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time: queer time in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends upon a rendering of the senses. In the spirit of the Muñoz quote above, this book looks to representations of the senses in narrative—that is, senses placed in time—to explore how they come to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable.
As I spend time with the texts of contemporary writers (not simply theorists but also novelists and memoirists), I reveal a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. I call this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium” and argue that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives on queer history, futurity, and relationality. As these writers attune their readers to ruptures in time through a narrative engagement with the senses, they make the case for queer modes of telling and queer modes of reading: they offer a queer hermeneutics. Narratives of the queer sensorium are out of step with normative time but in time with richer ways of being and knowing, with other possible queer life-worlds. It is no accident, I believe, that so many queer children survive their childhoods by crawling into books, clinging to the bodily intuition that books can generate another livable time/space. Because ultimately, we cannot think queer temporalities without understanding the impact of narrative representations of sensory experience.
There are, of course, multiple ways of inhabiting time and multiple times in each moment, inhabited in differing ways by various subjects. My analysis of four representative examples of narratives of the queer sensorium suggests that queer time, with all of its potentials and excesses, is vitally accessible in narratives of the senses. And further, it suggests that if we neglect the sensorial, we risk eliding the body and its particular insights from discussions of queer futurity. In focusing on the senses, I draw from work in several disciplines—queer theory, critical race theory, and affect theory most centrally—while my emphasis on literary analysis as a heuristic, a way of spending time with the texts, contributes to a cross-disciplinary conversation about what queer theory and narrative theory can offer one another. Literature is central to this study and to discussions of queer temporality more broadly, I contend, because it is a locus of formal experimentation in language, a site where the queer sensorium’s ability to scramble dominant narratives of heteronormative time is vividly enacted, where bodily-generated knowledge and feelings explode what we might think of as the policing efforts of a story about a “natural” way of inhabiting time and desire. Narratives of the queer sensorium demonstrate that the experience of the sensorium can render its subject out of sync with normative time, and can, moreover, enable that subject to feel the pleasure and the potential of such a state, rather than merely its terrors. If there is no such thing as normative time, only the stories we tell ourselves about normative time, then literature allows us to read a version of that story that reveals and moves beyond the arbitrariness of that norm. Queer time itself may be a fiction reactively intertwined with normative time, but like normative time, it is a fiction with material results. Some of us who cannot get with the program of normative time might be described as “never on time, but always in time”; in this book I move beyond registering forms of temporal disciplining to staging a serious examination of how a bodily-inhabited sense of queer time is mapped in narrative, and how that mapping might help queer bodily inhabitants live in time.
As I spend time with the texts of contemporary writers (not simply theorists but also novelists and memoirists), I reveal a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. I call this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium” and argue that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives on queer history, futurity, and relationality. As these writers attune their readers to ruptures in time through a narrative engagement with the senses, they make the case for queer modes of telling and queer modes of reading: they offer a queer hermeneutics. Narratives of the queer sensorium are out of step with normative time but in time with richer ways of being and knowing, with other possible queer life-worlds. It is no accident, I believe, that so many queer children survive their childhoods by crawling into books, clinging to the bodily intuition that books can generate another livable time/space. Because ultimately, we cannot think queer temporalities without understanding the impact of narrative representations of sensory experience.
There are, of course, multiple ways of inhabiting time and multiple times in each moment, inhabited in differing ways by various subjects. My analysis of four representative examples of narratives of the queer sensorium suggests that queer time, with all of its potentials and excesses, is vitally accessible in narratives of the senses. And further, it suggests that if we neglect the sensorial, we risk eliding the body and its particular insights from discussions of queer futurity. In focusing on the senses, I draw from work in several disciplines—queer theory, critical race theory, and affect theory most centrally—while my emphasis on literary analysis as a heuristic, a way of spending time with the texts, contributes to a cross-disciplinary conversation about what queer theory and narrative theory can offer one another. Literature is central to this study and to discussions of queer temporality more broadly, I contend, because it is a locus of formal experimentation in language, a site where the queer sensorium’s ability to scramble dominant narratives of heteronormative time is vividly enacted, where bodily-generated knowledge and feelings explode what we might think of as the policing efforts of a story about a “natural” way of inhabiting time and desire. Narratives of the queer sensorium demonstrate that the experience of the sensorium can render its subject out of sync with normative time, and can, moreover, enable that subject to feel the pleasure and the potential of such a state, rather than merely its terrors. If there is no such thing as normative time, only the stories we tell ourselves about normative time, then literature allows us to read a version of that story that reveals and moves beyond the arbitrariness of that norm. Queer time itself may be a fiction reactively intertwined with normative time, but like normative time, it is a fiction with material results. Some of us who cannot get with the program of normative time might be described as “never on time, but always in time”; in this book I move beyond registering forms of temporal disciplining to staging a serious examination of how a bodily-inhabited sense of queer time is mapped in narrative, and how that mapping might help queer bodily inhabitants live in time.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Queer Narratology: Reading and Writing the Senses in Time Chapter 1 Re/pasts: The Reiterated Ephemerality of Food in The Book of Salt Chapter 2 Relays, Negative Space, and the Temporalities of AIDS Chapter 3 Interruptive Intensity, Community, and the Queer Artist Chapter 4 Drawing on the Senses: The Reparative Potential of Fun Home’s Graphic Form Conclusion Works Cited Index
Descriere
Explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses, opening new perspectives onto queer history, futurity, and relationality.