Text

theses

“Bad Readers, Perverse Dreams” examines what I call “bad reading”—modes of reading defined by uncritical ardor, perverse identification, hallucinatory confusion, and willful fantasy. I argue that postwar writers turn to experimental writing to develop forms of bad reading that challenge socially sanctioned affective responses to queer sexuality. Bad reading thus expands the affective relations readers can enact with text and texts with readers. Queer experimental writing is therefore not solely transgressive, as is often argued, but a performative mode of social imagination. However, its construction of social forms only becomes apparent when we historicize bad reading within postwar debates over the representation of non-normative desire. Each chapter thus pivots on the problems of reading that arise when writers draw on experimental form to represent sexual fantasy and desire; these writers include William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delany, Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Eve Sedgwick, and Alison Bechdel, among others. I examine how their experimental writing purposively elicits uncritical responses from readers—shock, disgust, titillation, anger, and love. These affective relations press back against constrictions placed on erotic representation, and they performatively reconstitute the relations between readers and texts endorsed by normative culture. My dissertation thus reveals that the analysis of affect is key to the definitional volatility of “reading” within the postwar period. I establish that the contestation of “critical reading” has been an ongoing project for authors of experimental writing since the mid-fifties. Whereas scholars tend to oppose critical and uncritical reading, experimental writers dialectically entwine affect, critique, and social imagination within bad reading. Bad reading therefore enables experimental writers to represent queer social forms that are otherwise unrealizable in their present. Thus, I conclude that experimental writing lies at the vanguard of postwar redefinitions of reading as an embodied, critical practice that can spark the desire for queer forms of community.

ETD_5005

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Tyler Bradway

doi:10.7282/T3ST7MVT

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.