Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading

Postwar writers queer the affective relations of reading through experiments with literary form, conceptualizing "bad reading" as an affective politics that stimulates queer relations of erotic and political belonging. Each chapter traces the affective politics of bad reading against moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed. Bradway contests the common narrative that experimental writing is too formalist to engender a mode of social imagination, revealing how queer experimental literature uses form to redraw the affective and social relations that structure the heteronormative public sphere.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 268 pages
Publication date: 07 June 2018
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

This book makes a compelling case that postwar writers use queer experimentation with literary form to disrupt the emotional connections of reading. Tyler Bradway defines "bad reading" as an affective politics that fosters queer connections of erotic and political belonging in the act of reading. These nascently social relationships resist the legal, economic, and discursive forces that reduce queerness to a mode of individuality.

Each chapter explores the affective politics of bad reading in the face of moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed. This includes the pre-Stonewall literary obscenity debates, the AIDS crisis, the emergence of neoliberal homonormativity, and the gentrification of the queer avant-garde. Bradway challenges the conventional narrative that experimental writing is too formalist to foster a mode of social imagination. Instead, he demonstrates how queer experimental literature uses form to redefine the emotional and social relations that shape the heteronormative public sphere.

Through close readings informed by affect theory, Queer Experimental Literature offers fresh perspectives on writers such as William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alison Bechdel, and Chuck Palahniuk. Ultimately, Queer Experimental Literature reveals that the recent turn to affective reading in literary studies is rooted in a para-academic history of bad reading that provides new idioms for understanding the affective agencies of queer aesthetics.

Weight: 438g
Dimension: 162 x 466 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781349955541
Edition number: Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017