American Literary History and Queer Temporalities

Abstract

Queer theory is particularly well positioned at the present time to lead a field-wide reconsideration of what we mean when we talk about literary history. Over the last two decades, queer theory has gained considerable legitimacy as a critical endeavor, and in that same time its foci have evolved from examinations of queer sex, sexuality, and politics, to even more ambitious inquiries concerning the nature of affect and of temporality.1 In not-fully-acknowledged ways, these more ambitious developments run parallel to a renewed scholarly interest in literary history and historiography, at the same time that these developments have already addressed some of the methodological questions that a new generation of literary historians is beginning to ask. The objective of this short paper is to demonstrate that the writing of literary history, as it is currently practiced, is structured by assumptions about history that queer theory at the present time has productively challenged and revised. This paper aims to unite these two fields—or, more precisely, to show how they may already be united in purpose if not in practice. American literary history in its current postexceptionalist moment is an ineluctably queer project.

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