Queer Experimental Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-lxiii

   PDF

2. Naked Lust: Obscene Relationality and the Turn to Queer Experimental Literature

   • Tyler Bradway

   Pages 1-49

3. Reading in Crisis: Queer Hermeneutics as Affective History

   • Tyler Bradway

   Pages 51-102

4. The Languages of the Body: Becoming Unreadable in Postmodernity

   • Tyler Bradway

   Pages 103-143

5. Queer Exuberance: Visceral Reading and the Politics of Positive Affect

   • Tyler Bradway

   Pages 145-192

6. “Permeable We!”: Queer Theory’s (Re)turn to Reading with Feeling

   • Tyler Bradway

   Pages 193-232

7. Conclusion: The Queerness of Aesthetic Agency

   • Tyler Bradway

   Pages 233-246

8. Back Matter

   Pages 247-268

   PDF

This volume argues that postwar writers queer the affective relations of reading through experiments with literary form. Tyler Bradway conceptualizes “bad reading” as an affective politics that stimulates queer relations of erotic and political belonging in the event of reading. These incipiently social relations press back against legal, economic, and discursive forces that reduce queerness into a mode of individuality. Each chapter traces the affective politics of bad reading against moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed—from the pre-Stonewall literary obscenity debates, through the AIDS crisis, to the emergence of neoliberal homonormativity and the gentrification of the queer avant-garde. Bradway contests the common narrative that experimental writing is too formalist to engender a mode of social imagination. Instead, he illuminates how queer experimental literature uses form to redraw the affective and social relations that structure the heteronormative public sphere. Through close readings informed by affect theory, Queer Experimental Literature offers new perspectives on writers such as William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alison Bechdel, and Chuck Palahniuk. Queer Experimental Literature ultimately reveals that the recent turn to affective reading in literary studies is underwritten by a para-academic history of bad reading that offers new idioms for understanding the affective agencies of queer aesthetics. 

• Queer theory
• Affect Theory
• Deleuze
• Critical Theory
• Literary Criticism

“Queer Experimental Literature’s bold exegeses of iconic figures in postwar culture are to be recommended to any scholar of contemporary letters. … Bradway’s book makes needful interventions at the axis of affect studies and queer theory. … Queer Experimental Literature also takes the pulse of the current debate within English studies over our methods of interpretation.” (Michael Trask, College Literature, Vol. 45 (1), 2018)

“Gorgeously expansive, Bradway’s book understands reading queer experimental literature as an experience of intensity that precipitates new ways of being relational and collective in advance of existing social forms.  Bradway’s own writing is both lush and lucid, and will doubtless constellate new readerships too.  If this is what bad reading gives us, I’m all in.” (Elizabeth Freeman, Professor of English, University of California, Davis; Editor, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies; author of “Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories”)

“Tyler Bradway’s book is a bold and much-needed intervention on several fronts: queer theory, experimental writing, and affect studies. In incisive and spirited prose, it exposes tacit assumptions about what counts as good and bad reading and pushes current debates in new directions—the case for “queer exuberance” is especially powerful. A major resource for anyone concerned with the affective politics of reading.” (Rita Felski, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, University of Virginia, and Neils Bohr Professorship, University of Southern Denmark, Editor, New Literary History, author of “The Limits of Critique”)

“Tyler Bradway has written a beautiful, nuanced analysis of the power of queer experimental writing to elicit bad readings, readings that affirm the affects and bodily forces that texts can generate. Reading key texts by Acker, Burroughs, Delany, Winterson, and others affectively, Queer Experimental Literature affirms that some writings impact us, affect us, directly, generating new relations to ourselves and the world.” (Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor, Duke University, author of “Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art”)

• State University of New York at Cortland, Cortland, USA

  Tyler Bradway

Tyler Bradway is Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York at Cortland, USA.

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