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Hurst

Hurst Professor Grace Lavery Talk - Oscar Wilde After Cultural Studies

Grace Lavery's work addresses the history and theory of interpretation under capitalism, with a focus on the ascription of sexual meaning to flesh. Embarking from the psychoanalytic insight that flesh is both meaningless and the means by which meaning becomes possible, Grace has studied rarefied and complex construals of flesh in a set of highly-specific historical circumstances: the late-Victorian obsession with Japanese effeminacy (in my first book, Quaint, Exquisite); the emergence of the transsexual as a focal point for modern ideas about bodily technique (in her second scholarly monograph, Pleasure and Efficacy); the rigorous making and unmaking of the modern heterosexual in the postwar sitcom (in her third scholarly monograph, Closures); and in the post-2016 period’s cinematic, literary, and metaphysical narratives of demonic possession (in her fourth, Personal Demons).

In the early 1990s, the emerging field of queer theory took Oscar Wilde, the Irish Victorian playwright and wit, as both a central historical antecedent and as a certain kind of methodical inspiration. Thirty-five years later, Wilde has been provincialized: he remains a crucial figure in British and Irish literary and cultural histories of the 1880s and 1890s, but rarely if ever a focal point for queer theory as a humanistic metadiscourse. (None of the books in Duke’s Theory Q series includes a chapter on Wilde.) To understand how this happened, this paper explores the ambivalence with which the field treats the historical figure of the white, metropolitan, effeminate homosexual man, in whose posthumous image the liberal regime of LGBT civil rights was established as a legal and cultural code. Yet as the queer critique of LGBT civil rights discourse becomes redundant—as, that is, the rights themselves crumble before our eyes—a new Wilde becomes available to us, not as an historical forebear but as an individual who, like us, was forced to explain himself in terms designed by those who hated him, and then held responsible for those terms by his many readers. Wilde’s punishment for refusing to adopt the medico-judicial discourse of his oppressors was the slow juridical death of imprisonment with hard labor in Reading Gaol. Turning to a young Wilde’s attempts to formulate an account of himself in borrowed fragments of poetry, this lecture projects a critical future for Wilde’s many loving readers, made newly available for our post-liberal present.