2011 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
Queer Reading Practice and Its Methodology : Race, Ethnicity, Locality in Works of Hemingway and Cather
| Project/Area Number |
21520245
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Literature in English
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| Research Institution | Nagoya University |
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Principal Investigator |
MATSUSHITA Chikako 名古屋大学, 大学院・国際言語文化研究科, 准教授 (90273200)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2009 – 2011
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| Keywords | アメリカ文学 / クィア理論 / ヘミングウェイ / キャザー |
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| Research Abstract |
In the 1990s, many anthologies were compiled from works of lesbian and gay authors who had" come out." In the meantime, the hitherto unnoticed homosexuality of canonical authors also came to be a hot topic in literary criticism, being called queer reading. However, this trend did not gratify what the queer theorists actually meant by using the word“queer,"though practically it could visualize the existence of gays and lesbians in history as well as the possibility of homoerotic desire hidden in the people who were assumed to be straight. To discover a text's hidden homosexual connotations might seem to be a liberating way of reading. But in reality, all it could do was to drag the hiding homosexuals out of the closet, letting them be subsumed under the unequal binary opposition between normal heterosexuality and abnormal homosexuality. When the vocabulary of" queer" was added to the lexicon of critical theory, there was an unmistakable intention to deconstruct just that opposition. The
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refore,“outing,"that is, text-reading to expose hidden homosexuality, was not really faithful to the critical concept of the queer. So, it was urgently necessary for the literary criticism to establish a way of queer reading that did not rely on“outing."
This project has been started for this purpose. Through readings of several texts written by Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather, analyzes have been done on the hermeneutic dynamics at work in the process of“outing"by applying narratology and psychoanalysis. If the description of a certain sexual desire or activity can help determine the sexual identity of a fictional character, how does it do so? By clarifying to whom such a description belongs, who interprets the meaning of that description, and most importantly, who has the power to judge that character's sexuality, the queer reading presented in this project focuses on the process of how the closet itself comes to appear rather than discussing whether homosexuals are“in"or“out"of the closet. In this project, therefore, any sexual implication in the written texts is understood as a discursive experience that could be shared between the author, the narrator, and the reader, rather than the reflection of a thing that would be assumed to exist outside discourse. Less
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