1st Edition

Double Talk The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration

By Wayne Koestenbaum Copyright 1989
    226 Pages
    by Routledge

    226 Pages
    by Routledge

    Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent.

    Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores – works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry – emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

    Interpreting Double Talk: An Introduction.  Part 1. Men of Science  1. Privileging the Anus: Anna O. and the Collaborative Origin of Psychoanalysis  2. Unlocking Symonds: Sexual Inversion  Part 2. Poetic Partnerships  3. The Marinere Hath His Will(iam): Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads  4. The Waste Land: T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s Collaboration on Hysteria  Part 3. The Hour of Double Talk  5. Manuscript Affairs: Collaborative Romances of the Fin de Siècle

    Biography

    Wayne Koestenbaum