Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement.

Reviews

"Mobilizing disparate resources in lyric poetry, personal reflection, and queer theory, Michael Snediker argues for an optimism not reducible to hope and not opposed to knowledge. Queer Optimism demands that we think again about enjoyment, pain, personhood, and whether and how we live our theories. Its a challenging book of fresh perspectives and previously unwritable sentences." Rei Terada, author of Looking Away:Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno
"Queer Optimism is a majorpotentially paradigm-shiftingwork in queer theory. I cannot remember the last time I learned so much from reading a work of literary criticism." Tim Dean, Director of the Humanities Institute, University at Buffalo (SUNY)