Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and BaconUniversity of Chicago Press, 2000 - 219 pages In a far-ranging series of readings that considers Italian humanism, art history, Elizabethan drama, early experimental science, and contemporary theory, Graham Hammill offers a new poetics of sexuality. Arguing against the reduction of sex to historical information, Hammill compels us to reconceive sexuality and its relationship to history through the aesthetic: he proposes that in Western encounters with homosexuality, the flesh emerges as both a problem and a promise at the limits of the visual and dramatic narrative arts. Sexuality and Form explores the insistence of the flesh as an element of carnality that resists exchange and conversion. Beginning with humanist aesthetics and the art of war, Hammill first discusses how the body gets aligned with various and subtle forms of violence. He then explores the epistemological and aesthetic spaces in the paintings of Caravaggio and Michaelangelo, the plays of Christopher Marlowe, and the scientific treatises of Francis Bacon, demonstrating how in each the flesh is bruised into visibility through poses that underwrite and belie ideals of secular civility. Sexuality and Form is an ambitious new study of sexuality, aesthetics, and epistemology--one of the first works of its kind to bring queer theory and psychoanalysis together within a Renaissance framework. |
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aesthetic Alberti anal sex argues asserts attempts authority B-text Baltimore Panel Blumenberg body calls Cambridge Caravaggio Caravaggio's paintings Chicago Christian civilizing process Coke corporeal cultural Cupid desire disbelief Doctor Faustus effect epistemological epoch ethics exteriority fantasy Faustus's flesh Florence Florentine force formal Foucault Francis Bacon Freud Galateo Goldberg historiography homosexual homosocial Ibid identitary identity Irigaray istoria Italian Jacques Lacan Jacques-Alain Miller Jonathan Goldberg jouissance judges judgment judicial Judith Butler law reports literary logic male friendship Marlowe Marlowe's masculine meaning ment Mephostophilis merchant mode object oneself particular performance perspective Philip Rieff play poiesis political pose position practices problem problematicization proposes psychic space psychoanalysis queer relation Renaissance sexual difference Sigmund Freud signified simply social sodomy soul Spanish Spanish Inquisition sprezzatura sustains temporality things thinking thought tion trans translation truth University Press violence voice as objet writes York