http://www.amazon.com/Friendship-Queer-Theory-Renaissance-Literature/dp/0415713226

Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England 

In this volume, the author offers a substantial reconsideration of same-sex relations in the early modern period, and argues that early modern writers – rather than simply celebrating a classical friendship model based in dyadic exclusivity and a rejection of self-interest – sought to innovate on classical models for idealized friendship. This book redirects scholarly conversations regarding gender, sexuality, classical receptions, and the economic aspects of social relations in the early modern period. It points to new directions in the application of queer theory to Renaissance literature by examining group friendship as a celebrated social formation in the work of early modern writers from Shakespeare to Milton.

This volume will be of interest to scholars of the early modern period in England, as well as to those interested in the intersections between literature and gender studies, economic history and the economic aspects of social relations, the classics and the classical tradition, and the history of sexuality.

 

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415713221/


http://www.amazon.com/Friendship-Queer-Theory-Renaissance-Literature/dp/0415713226/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376063275&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=resaissance+friendship+queer+theory

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/milt.12001/abstract

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The Canonization of Snow Crash

An excerpt from Snow Crash (just Chapter 1) shows up in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Literature, which I am using in one of my classes. Though I skewed the syllabus for the fiction readings heavily sci-fi, I decided not to include the excerpt. Can this book be effectively excerpted? What is lost by thinking of it through the lense of "postmodern fiction," rather than the sci-fi genre to which it owes so much?

The anthology comes with a site to help the teach lead the discussion, here as the recommended questions:

• Like many works of science fiction, Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash presents a not-too-distant future based on an extrapolation of current trends. Identify the present-day economic, social, and technological trends from which Stephenson is working. Is his vision of the future credible?
• After a detailed description of the Deliverator’s high-tech equipment, the narrator asks, "Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model." How might the Deliverator be both a "roll model" and a "role model"?
• How does the Deliverator’s life compare to that of the Burbclave inhabitants? Does he have more freedom? What constitutes freedom for the Deliverator?

It's hard to imagine using these questions and not belittling the text. At its opening, Stephenson's novel feels like something written purely for fun, like a short-short story.

I'm not positing a criticism of Norton here -- the recommended questions for most of the other texts are spot-on -- rather I am suggesting that this novel is difficult to consider without the context of its genre and the rest of the book. Indeed, Snow Crash was originally conceived to be a graphic novel, and I've always felt its abruptness owed something to that. (The Norton anthology nicely includes excerpts from several graphic novels.)

transCendenZ (TM)

I find it interesting that Cronenberg often talks about "flesh" when he means so much more than that. From Videodrome's "Long Live the New Flesh" to EXistenZ' "MetaFlesh Game-Pod," Cronenberg seems to be locating new, reality-breaching experiences at the layer of the skin. Like much of the new forms of human described in the cyberpunk we've read this quarter, the new ways of being in Cronenberg have to do with growth or bio-organics but also link very closely to tropes of death: "Death to Videodrome!" and "Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!" (For a nice discussion of Cronenberg and the death drive, see Teresa de Lauretis' "Becoming Inorganic" in the Summer 2003 issue of Critical Inquiry.)

Perhaps it's the penetrable body that Cronenberg sees as both the enabling device to generate horror in his audience and also the site at which to imagine this work's central novum. The body not only offers a physical entrypoint for the gamepod to connect and affect the characters, but it also offers the central metaphor by which the gamepod communicates with the humans. Indeed, the body is the means by which we realize the gamepod's sentience. Take for example Allegra's realization that the pod introduces the theme of disease into the game in order to let her know that it is malfunctioning. Like a child or animal without language, the pod strives to communicate its suffering through gesture and other metaphorical representations of its pain. Further, the pod seems to only know how to create objects from other bodies (e.g, the fishbone gun).

Might the gamepod be communicating both its own independent thinking and its status a new kind of living being birthed from the human?