Tiresian Poetics Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001 ED MADDEN Blind seer, articulate dead, an... more Tiresian Poetics Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001 ED MADDEN Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological ...
Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, is repeatedly described as a &qu... more Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, is repeatedly described as a "bible" of lesbian literature. The novel itself repeatedly alludes to biblical stories, especially the story of Christ. Yet there has been little sustained analysis of the biblical language of the novel. Most feminist and lesbian critics have dismissed the biblical allusions and language as unfortunate and politically regressive; religious critics have ignored the novel. This essay reexamines the biblical nature of the novel, especially its portrayal of the lesbian Stephen Gordon as a Christ figure. The study further claims a creative and interventionary power in Hall's use of biblical narratives and tropes, a power traceable in public reception to the novel and in courtroom reactions to the use of spiritual language in a text about lesbianism. By writing the life of a lesbian as a kind of gospel of inversion, Hall turns a language of condemnation into a language of validation, making her use of biblical language a kind of Foucauldian "reverse discourse." The novel's power lies in its portrayal of a lesbian messiah, and in its joining of sexological and religious discourses.
Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversations about the …
... She finds gay por-nography next to Christian youth materials in his dresser. ... Oranges Are ... more ... She finds gay por-nography next to Christian youth materials in his dresser. ... Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the young pro-tagonist Jeanette tells her girlfriend Melanie on their way to church one morning," I love you almost as much as I love the Lord." But once in church, a ...
England in the 1880s saw a brief flower ing of homosexual subcultures in liter ary London and Oxf... more England in the 1880s saw a brief flower ing of homosexual subcultures in liter ary London and Oxford, a flowering marked by the publication of numerous vol umes of homoerotic poetry, but cut short by the consolidation and criminalization of homosexual identity in the Oscar ...
Tiresian Poetics Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001 ED MADDEN Blind seer, articulate dead, an... more Tiresian Poetics Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001 ED MADDEN Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological ...
Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, is repeatedly described as a &qu... more Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, is repeatedly described as a "bible" of lesbian literature. The novel itself repeatedly alludes to biblical stories, especially the story of Christ. Yet there has been little sustained analysis of the biblical language of the novel. Most feminist and lesbian critics have dismissed the biblical allusions and language as unfortunate and politically regressive; religious critics have ignored the novel. This essay reexamines the biblical nature of the novel, especially its portrayal of the lesbian Stephen Gordon as a Christ figure. The study further claims a creative and interventionary power in Hall's use of biblical narratives and tropes, a power traceable in public reception to the novel and in courtroom reactions to the use of spiritual language in a text about lesbianism. By writing the life of a lesbian as a kind of gospel of inversion, Hall turns a language of condemnation into a language of validation, making her use of biblical language a kind of Foucauldian "reverse discourse." The novel's power lies in its portrayal of a lesbian messiah, and in its joining of sexological and religious discourses.
Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversations about the …
... She finds gay por-nography next to Christian youth materials in his dresser. ... Oranges Are ... more ... She finds gay por-nography next to Christian youth materials in his dresser. ... Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the young pro-tagonist Jeanette tells her girlfriend Melanie on their way to church one morning," I love you almost as much as I love the Lord." But once in church, a ...
England in the 1880s saw a brief flower ing of homosexual subcultures in liter ary London and Oxf... more England in the 1880s saw a brief flower ing of homosexual subcultures in liter ary London and Oxford, a flowering marked by the publication of numerous vol umes of homoerotic poetry, but cut short by the consolidation and criminalization of homosexual identity in the Oscar ...
Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represente... more Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed and embodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has.com e to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualties.
This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian and modernist writers re-imagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or performance power in figures of sexual difference- most often a feminized, often homosexual male body, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity.
Almost stepped on it, on them, bits of digit, a pinky, knuckle, in the grass and gravel, gravesid... more Almost stepped on it, on them, bits of digit, a pinky, knuckle, in the grass and gravel, graveside, no blood, just dust, grit, some wire in it, in them, the fingers, bits fallen off, but it's the savior not a leper, or perhaps St. Pat, some pope—don't know, just that he's mythic, biblical, robed, and old as these things go, though these tombs are newer than the ruins all around—the stone he's propped on a grave of the lately gone—he's chipped, maybe chapped, grey saint, white-washed, waving his hand like that, disfigured benediction for those damn kids crawling the walls and up inside the old tower, cider and crisps in the friary, butts, some fumbling about the motte and bailey just beside, relics left behind, like these knocked off parts on the lawn, almost stepped on, those two bent digits in the litter that say he was divine and not, flesh like us, to be picked up, pocketed.
Ed Madden’s contribution to this special issue is a creative response to themes of the Irish goth... more Ed Madden’s contribution to this special issue is a creative response to themes of the Irish gothic, including four poems from his most recent book, A pooka in Arkansas (Word Works, 2023) and a new poem written explicitly for this volume. The poems offer a creative engagement with themes that animate Irish gothic representation (otherness, repression, authenticity, sexuality, threat) in relation to both sexual and ethnic identity, as well as a specific focus on the folkloric figure of the pooka/púca.
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2018
This chapter focuses on two plays by Colm Clifford, an Irish gay migrant active in the early 1970... more This chapter focuses on two plays by Colm Clifford, an Irish gay migrant active in the early 1970s gay liberation movement and a founding member of the agitprop theatre group, the Brixton Faeries. Through the 1980s, he began to write plays and poetry addressing the migrant identity and belonging—especially the difficult interstitial identities of the queer ethnic migrant. His first play, Friends of Rio Rita (1985), performed for both LGBT and Irish theatre audiences in London, addressed the difficulties of being gay and Irish. As he explained in a 1985 interview, “I can list forever the oppression of Irish people living in England, yet I cannot live [as a gay man] in Ireland”—a difficult position exacerbated by the anti-Irish racism of English gay men and the anti-gay attitudes of the Irish migrant community. His second play, Reasons for Staying (1986), broadens its focus to include a woman who stayed in England after seeking an abortion and an old navvy whose friends back home have died, as well as a second-generation Irishman and his English fiancee whose perceptions of Ireland are coloured by nostalgia and tourist posters. Clifford’s work, which has failed to receive critical attention or adequate publication, is a critical intervention in representations of gender and sexuality in the Irish diaspora, and as the Irish canon of LGBT work becomes increasingly calcified, a reconsideration of his work suggests the centrality of diaspora studies to Irish queer studies—and the necessity of queer studies to Irish diaspora studies.
Page 1. 133 Teaching Joyce Ed Madden University of South Carolina Yeah, they say, clay's the... more Page 1. 133 Teaching Joyce Ed Madden University of South Carolina Yeah, they say, clay's the title, but what's really in the plate? They take to the game, puicini, proposing nasty things shuffled and placed before her blind palmssoft ...
ABSTRACT Cover of The Hunger by David Rees, published by Gay Men’s Press (London 1986), cover art... more ABSTRACT Cover of The Hunger by David Rees, published by Gay Men’s Press (London 1986), cover art by Peter Dawson. In the 2003 collectionI Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness, Irish-American poet James Liddy begins the poem “Francis” by calling Francis Bacon the “Most beautiful Englishman ever to live in Ireland.” Liddy goes on to connect Bacon to another Anglo-Irish queer, Oscar Wilde, adding, “the importance of being earnest angry and funny a big brother/sister” (75). The gender slash of “brother/sister” locates Bacon between normative gender identities but within a figure of queer kinship, a relationship grounded in gender dissidence and disruptive social affect. Bacon is situated thus between gender and ethnic identities, in a space that is imagined and discursive rather than geographic—like Micheál MacLiammóir, whom Liddy imagined as “born neither in London (the reality) nor Cork (the fiction) but ‘on that patch of earth named to poetry’” (Arkins 105). Beginning in dislocation, the poem ends with a startling reclamation and transformation of place: “Look what I have done with the country inside me” (76). The line could refer to the visceral imagery of Bacon’s art, given the poem’s references to his paintings as “dead meat so beautiful you eat it,” but more importantly it suggests a central tenet of diaspora studies: that the homeland is an imagined space rather than a geographically specific place, and that national belonging is a process of internalization and incorporation, subject to transformations both corporeal and imagined. A common analytic emphasis on place of origin, says Brian Keith Axel, “posits that a homeland is originary and constitutive of a diaspora, and very often supports an essentialization of origins and a fetishization of what is supposed to be found at the origin (e.g., tradition, religion, language, race)” (DI 411). Against this analytic model of place, Axel proposes a “diasporic imaginary,” arguing that disaporic subjects are created “not through a definitive relation to place, but through formations of temporality, affect, and corporeality” (412). He explains that the homeland “must be understood as an affective and temporal process rather than a place,” a formulation that “draws the homeland into relation with other kinds of images and processes, . . . different bodies or corporeal images and historical formulations of sexuality, gender, and violence” (426).1 Adapting Axel’s concept, Jasbir K. Puar argues further that the shift from origin to “other forms of diasporic affiliative and cathartic entities” specifically enables a queer diasporic thinking by allowing for “connectivity beyond or different from sharing a common ancestral homeland,” and thus for the possibility of “queer narratives of kinship, belonging, and home” (QT 135). In this essay, I want to suggest some possibilities for queer diasporic thinking in Irish studies. Irish migrant and diaspora studies as a field has done little, thus far, to develop the place of lesbians and gays in the imagined community of diaspora, beyond the spaces cleared for lesbian and gay identity in the groundbreaking work of Breda Gray on migrant women and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill on migrant men, the particular analysis of complex allegiances in Anne Maguire’s personal writing about the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization’s struggle to march in the New York Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, or the necessary queering of diaspora theory in the work of Eithne Luibhéid.2 A queer Irish diaspora project might focus on the histories, narratives, silences, demographics, and struggles of lesbians and gay men among the migrant Irish. Or it might remark on the fact that until very recently (that is, before decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993), homosexuality was so insistently displaced abroad in Irish literature and culture that queer sexuality was a diasporic project. Instead, after briefly suggesting basic elements of lesbian and gay migrant narratives (particularly a rethinking of the concept of home), I want to focus on two writers: novelist David Rees and poet Padraig Rooney, and possibilities their works suggest for, to adapt Puar, connectivities beyond or different from or coincident with a shared...
In Western literature of the twentieth century, the mythical figure of Tiresias often functions a... more In Western literature of the twentieth century, the mythical figure of Tiresias often functions as a cultural shorthand for non-normative sex-ual identities and pleasures. In Marcel Jouhandeau's 1954 erotic novel, Tiresias, a bisexual man, renames himself as Tiresias after being ...
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This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian and modernist writers re-imagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or performance power in figures of sexual difference- most often a feminized, often homosexual male body, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity.