Henry James and the "Aliens"

In Possession of the American Scene
Erscheinungsjahr 2002
ISBN: 978-90-420-1280-6
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 10, 164 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 308 g

Reihe: Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies

Henry James and the “Aliens” intervenes substantially in current debates in James studies, most notably in the key areas of cultural studies, ethnic studies and queer studies. Focusing throughout on questions of identity, and most prominently on how the latter is given shape in the very form of the late style, the book finds that James’s response to the ethnic other can be grasped neither as an attempt to police, supervise and master the other, nor as a politics of non-identical surrender to that other. Instead, there is a continuum of identity—akin to the “criminal continuity” that James registers throughout the American scene—in which self and other, native and alien, subject and object adopt alternate roles of control and submission. Both are at times in possession of the American scene and possessed by that scene. Jamesian sexual identity, too, proves to be constantly reconstituted in transitive processes of signification that make it impossible to fix the “I” or the “other” within a fixed framework—be that framework a heterosexual or a homosexual one. The eroticism that strikingly informs the late James can therefore only be captured, if at all, under the rubric of the “queer.”

Autoren/Hrsg.

Buelens, Gert

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Then Is the American Scene?
One: Possessing the American Scene: Race and Vulgarity, Seduction and Judgment
Two: Consuming, Performing and Judging the American Scene
Three: Enjoying the American Scene: The Overpowering “Presence” of Sites, Buildings and “Aliens”
Four: Queering the American Scene: James’s Obliquely Possessive Plottings of Desire
Index