Dana Seitler's Books

Atavistic Tendencies

The Culture of Science in American Modernity

By: Dana Seitler

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Atavistic Tendencies

The Culture of Science in American Modernity

By: Dana Seitler

The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits after several generations of absence. In this original and stimulating work, Dana Seitler explores the ways in which modernity itself is an atavism, shaping a historical and theoretical account of its dramatic rise and impact on Western culture and imagination.

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Page Count

327

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081665123X

ISBN 13

9780816651238

Reading Sideways

The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

By: Dana Seitler

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Reading Sideways

The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

By: Dana Seitler

Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aesthetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience but also an engagement with political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and sexual expression. To track these engagements, its author, Dana Seitler, performs a method she calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of—and see in a new light—their connections, challenges, and productive frictions. Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera. These art forms appear in some of the major works of literature of the period central to negotiations of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. But the literary texts that each chapter of this book takes as its motivation not only include a specific art form or object as central to its politics, they also build an alternative aesthetic vocabulary through which they seek to alter, challenge, or participate in the making of social and sexual life. By cultivating a counter-aesthetics of the unfinished, the uncertain, the small, the low, and the allusive, these fictions recognize other ways of knowing and being than those oriented toward reductively gendered accounts of beauty, classed imperatives established by the norms of taste, or apolitical treatises of sexual disinterestedness. And within them—and through “reading sideways”—we can witness the coming-into-legibility of a set of diffuse practices that provide a pivot point for engaging the political methods of minoritized subjects at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Page Count

183

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823282635

ISBN 13

9780823282630

How the Earth Feels

Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States

By: Dana Luciano

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How the Earth Feels

Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States

By: Dana Luciano

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.

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Page Count

161

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478027843

ISBN 13

9781478027843

Lateral Aesthetics

Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

By: Dana Seitler

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Lateral Aesthetics

Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

By: Dana Seitler

Reading Sideways explores the role various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera, which appear in the major works of the period central to questions of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman.

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Page Count

208

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823282627

ISBN 13

9780823282623

Atavistic Tendencies

The Culture of Science in American Modernity

By: Dana Seitler

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Atavistic Tendencies

The Culture of Science in American Modernity

By: Dana Seitler

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

327

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081665123X

ISBN 13

9780816651238

Book's by Dana Seitler

Atavistic Tendencies

Atavistic Tendencies

Reading Sideways

Reading Sideways

How the Earth Feels

How the Earth Feels

Lateral Aesthetics

Lateral Aesthetics

Atavistic Tendencies

Atavistic Tendencies

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