EVENT DETAILS

Elizabeth Freeman Mini Seminar: Sense-Methods: Erotohistoriography, Chronochresis, Sacra/mentality

Sense-Methods: Erotohistoriography, Chronochresis, Sacra/mentality

This series of mini-seminars will be on a set of possible concepts for imagining how to do things without words, how do to things with carnality, how to theorize visceral kinds of understanding. In the first talk, I’ll return to my concept of erotohistoriography from Time Binds, opening up more fully its relationship to theories of historical consciousness via a reading of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court alongside of his satires about masturbation. In the second, I’ll use Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” to limn a theory of the chronic as a mode of chresis, of occupying the body with time, and time with the body. The final lecture will take up the problems and the promises of a queer sacramental analytic, which attends to both the demands of queer critique’s historical, materialist orientations and its more ideational philosophical impulses – possibly through Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove.


Elizabeth Freeman is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of two Duke University Press books: The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (2002) and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010). She also co-edits, with Nayan Shah, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.