“Queer theory has long preoccupied itself with the trouble with normal; Shollenberger’s brilliant study argues that ordinariness might offer a different and more productive kind of trouble. Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism is an extraordinary document of the creativity and intelligence that goes into the ordinary work of creating and sustaining queer lives.” —Brian Glavey, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis
“Bottling the atmosphere of ordinary life in our present moment to bring its queer glints into view is no easy task, but Shollenberger does it with panache. This book shimmers as the ordinary mingles with the queer, and we go on with a renewed understanding of the mundane.” —Benjamin Kahan, editor of The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
“By offering a compelling alternative to queer reading practices that turn on the metaphor of the closet, Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism provides a lens through which to view manifestations of queerness beyond those within queer theory’s North American and European metropolitan frames.” —Chris Coffman, author of Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories
Can queer life be ordinary? By answering “yes,” Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism prompts queer studies to consider what it has long devalued and neglected: the ordinary lives queer people create. Declining to cede the ordinary to queer studies’ critique of the normal, Jess Shollenberger argues for and models a reading practice that is attuned to queer desires, figures, and intimacies arrayed against the normal yet enabled by ordinary life. By tracing the representation of queerness in modernist literature as presence, possibility, and insistence, Shollenberger illuminates how the modernist interest in ordinary life cannot be understood apart from queer experience, culture, and aesthetics. Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism disturbs queer studies by turning toward the ordinary as an object for queer inquiry and by reading perversely without the dominant hermeneutic for queer literary studies—the closet. Across interpretations of work by Sarah Orne Jewett, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop, Shollenberger develops the practice of reading modernist writing without the closet, expanding the scope of modernist studies and augmenting our knowledge of queerness for a shifting, unstable present.
Jess Shollenberger is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. Their articles have been published in Modernism/modernity, South Atlantic Review, Jacket2, and College Literature.
Contents
Introduction An Acquaintance with the Ordinary
Chapter 1 The Sex Lives of Spinsters: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Distant Intimacies
Chapter 2 “She Would Polish and Hone That”: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Pleasures of Form
Chapter 3 “They Were Regularly Gay There”: Gertrude Stein’s Explicit Abstraction
Chapter 4 “‘Rose Rocks’ or Maybe ‘Rock Roses’”: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Passion for Accuracy”
Epilogue Ordinary Reading
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index
