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Chances Are: Contingency, Queer Theory and American Literature book cover

1st Edition

Chances Are Contingency, Queer Theory and American Literature

By Valerie Rohy Copyright 2019
174 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

174 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

174 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This innovative work makes use of psychoanalytic, queer, and narrative theories to read nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and demonstrate how the concept of contingency—whether chance, accident, luck, or mutation—enriches our understanding of how queer sexualities are articulated. Perhaps love always carries an element of contingency (our attraction to a particular person... Read more

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Taking Chances

• Heterosexual Necessity

2. Gambling on Marriage: The House of Mirth and The Pit

3. The Calculus of Probabilities: "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"

• Accidental Narratives

4. Alger and Emerson: Racism, Retroaction, and the Marriage Plot

5. Racial Contingency: Iola Leroy and Passing

• Contingent Reading

6. Interpretation by Chance: Bechdel, Winnicott, Woolf

7. Exchanging Hours: A Dialogue on Time

8. Conclusion: Not Knowing

Notes

Index

　

　

　

　

Biography

Valerie Rohy is a Professor of English and the University of Vermont. She is the author of　Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Cornell, 2000), Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (SUNY, 2009), and Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory (Oxford, 2015).

 

"Chances Are　astutely examines the crucial role of contingency in queer American literary representations. Tracking the ways chance plays through multiple discourses—narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory—Rohy’s study shows the ways that literary renditions of individual subjects, romance, sexualities, and fate all depend upon a range of possibilities instead of any pre-defined necessity."

 -- Judith Roof, Professor, Rice University

"To let chance encounters remain chancy, to risk contingency and 　contemplate its queerness, is both the challenge and the pleasure of Valerie Rohy’s readings of theory and American fiction in this study.　 She surprises us with queer appreciations of contingency in straight classics from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton, and also gives us a fresh appreciation of a queer canon that includes H. D., Nella Larsen, and Alison Bechdel.　 Her focus on the question of chance in queer theory, reaching back through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lee Edelman to Derrida, Barthes, and Freud, offers a new direction for criticism on narrative and desire.　 Her writing is lucid, rigorous, at times deeply personal – and always at peace with the unpredictable." 　　　　　

 -- Ellis Hanson, Professor, Cornell University

"Rohy’s nimble reading offers an astute assessment of contingency in queer time, persuasively demonstrating chance’s power to overturn heteronormative necessity."

 -- E. L. McCallum, Associate Professor, Michigan State University

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