Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

The Materialism Of The Encounter: Queer Sociality And Capital In Modern Literature, Michael David Schmidt

Wayne State University Dissertations

In The Materialism of the Encounter I argue for the critical importance of queer sociality as a confrontation with global capital in which sexualities emerge as a material history necessary for rethinking the broader experiences of twentieth century modernity. To do so, I draw together a series of transnational texts--Henry James's nonfiction travel narrative The American Scene, Djuna Barnes's canonical Nightwood, and two neglected novels, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's The Young and Evil and Claude McKay's unpublished Romance in Marseilles--that exhibit a mode of sociality and literary practice I am calling the "encounter." While the …