#marjorie garber

[butchhamlet]

[Beatrice is] an unmarried woman dependent upon the hospitality of her uncle. This is the same position that Rosalind in As You Like It occupies at the court of her uncle, Duke Frederick, but there marriage is not the constant topic of conversation—and, of course, Rosalind manages to make her escape, together with her cousin Celia. In Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice and Hero are the young women of the household, and it is expected that they will marry. [...] Beatrice is not an heiress [...and] her position is more precarious than Hero's. [...This] will return, more vividly and painfully, after the humiliation of Hero, when Beatrice longs to revenge her cousin and must instead enlist Benedick's aid to fight with Claudio: "O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place" (4.1.303-304). It is worth noting that in other Shakespearean comedies of this period the heroine does become a man, at least for a little while. Portia, Rosalind, and Viola all cross-dress, assuming male costumes and names in order to perform some act of rescue, release, or revenge. But Beatrice has this option only in the wishful form of a condition contrary to fact. Much Ado About Nothing is a play that engages topics like male bonding and female disempowerment, for all the powerful figures in Messina are men.

—Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

(i find the comparison to rosalind especially fruitful--rosalind and celia mirror beatrice and hero in a lot of ways, but they actually get to transgress gender and class boundaries a little. in messina that shit is locked DOWN)

[hayleylovesjessica]

New physical media that's come in over the last day or two. All of these items were 50% off, so I had to pull the trigger! Regarding The Shield of Achilles, one of these days, I really want to write and publish something smart about Auden. As for Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, its longest chapter is on Virginia Woolf, and I really want to see what Marjorie Garber has to say about Woolf and Shakespeare. Finally, now that I have Ivan's Childhood, I just need Solaris to have all the Criterion Collection's Tarkovsky discs.

[yvain]

Philip Sidney wrote a Defence of Poesie in 1595. Percy Shelley wrote a Defence of Poetry in 1821. Why, we might ask, does literature have to defend itself?

In part, it's Plato’ fault. His famous exiling of poets from a well-ordered republic, on the grounds that they offered doxa, or opinion, rather than logos, or reason/discourse, instantiated an unhappy split between what we now call art and what we now call science. For Plato, the classic Greek poets—Homer and the tragic dramatists—whose work had formed the basis of a Greek education (paideia) depicted in their work all manner of deleterious behavior: murder, incest, cruelty, cowardice, treachery, strong passions out of control. Poetry thus weakened moral character and potentially influenced both actor/performer and audience. Since poetry in this period meant oral poetry, whether epic or dramatic—not the reading and study of written texts—the possibility of such emotional effects, rather than a rational assessment and distance, was, he thought, strong. If a schoolchild memorized Homer on the wrath of Achilles, what he learned was wrath, not poetry.

From the perspective of a modern educational system, where poetry is far less central than it was to the ancient Greeks, Plato’s insistence on the dangers of poetry and poets may seem either quaint or excessive. But that is because we have so diminished the importance of literature (and music and art) over the years.

Both in Republic, where he describes what he regards as an ideal education for guardians and citizens of Athens, and elsewhere in his dialogues, Plato emphasizes the role of poetry and music on the one hand, and physical training on the other, as the key elements for training the soul and the body. In his own academy, Plato taught a different kind of learning, one based upon dialectics and philosophical reasoning, with the claim that literature should serve a moral and social function and should teach cultural elements like goodness, grace, reason, and respect for law.

This instrumental view of literature (Plato’s poetry includes epic, tragedy, and other modes of imaginative writing), which demands that it do some good in the world, is, I will argue, part of the difficulty that literary study has wrestled with from its beginnings to the present. What is often called “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” the idea (voiced from the side of philosophy since Plato) that literature needs to make us better people, is now partnered with and augmented by a more modern set of questions about why we should read and study literature in a world increasingly global, economic, technological, and visual. Are the blandishments of the rhapsodes and interpreters and sophists, the orators, still dangerous? Still seductive? Does literature threaten society, or does it help to build society’s values and institutions? Or are these the wrong questions and the wrong justifications for literature and its readers?

Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature

[dhaaruni]

– Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Marjorie Garber

[verilybitchie]

Is bisexuality a 'third kind' of sexual identity, between or beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality? Or is it something that puts in question the very concept of sexual identity in the first place?

Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, 1995

[sufyawning]

the conventions of marriage

letters to a young poet by rilke // blessing of the young couple before marriage by pascal dagnan-bouveret // trick mirror by jia tolentino // 80′s bridal magazine // bisexuality and the eroticism of everyday life by marjorie garber

[lizlemondyke]

currently feeling like a lascivious Mercutio-esque lad of indiscriminate sexuality with deep homoerotic tendencies, as I lean back precariously with only two legs of my chair on the floor, both feet up on the nearby table, reading my book and honestly it’s really sexy of me

[criticalinvert]

Queer chic is now so chic in metrosexual circles that the "straight queer" is everywhere to be found. GQ sketched out a "Spectrum of Gay Positivity" that ranged from "Active in Gay Causes" (Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor) to "Appropriating Gay Characteristics" (Markie Mark, Prince), "Professing One's Own Inner Gayness" (Kurt Cobain, Sharon Stone), and "Pretending to Be Gay" (Madonna, certain college students). "Fumbling disclosures of omnisexuality" were viewed as a necessary awkward stage through which the "cultural elite" was passing-part of the price of ultimate social acceptance and assimilation, "until gay culture becomes boringly familiar to Americans, like hip-hop in the suburbs and Protestant-Catholic intermarriage." This will not, it seems safe to say, happen tomorrow. But is what GQ dubbed the "queer-is-cool philosophy" a fashion or a sexuality? Or is there any difference?  "Queer" sounds quite different when used as a term for oneself than it does when it is shouted or sneered from the street corner. Its power as an aggressive generalization, a refusal to accept "a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation" in favor of a "resistance to regimes of the normal,"" makes the term a powerful theoretical tool for queer theorists. The word's in-your-face qualities, what lesbian playwright Holly Hughes called its "cringe factor,"93 have contributed to its popularization, against the theoretical grain, by people, especially young people, who are adamantly not interested in "theory." Yet as many participants in the new sexuality debates stress, "queer" has real drawbacks when specificity and representation are required. It is a postmodern label with roots in fashion and discourse, and an appealing omnipresence in early twentieth-century literary and cultural texts ("You're a queer one, Julie Jordan") that seems to validate the historical existence of "queer people" before the queer movement, and Queer Nation, took off. But despite its value as a political slogan, "queer" is not, finally and fundamentally, an easy political term. Lesbian and gay writers from Terry Castle to Eric Marcus have expressed doubts about its pertinence, since it erodes the very specificity they consider crucial. "The term queer has lately become popular in activist and progressive academic circles in part, it seems to me, precisely because it makes it easy to enfold female homosexuality back 'into' male homosexuality and disembody the lesbian once again," writes Castle. "To the extent that 'queer theory' still seems . . . to denote primarily the study of male homosexuality, I find myself at odds with both its language and its universalizing aspirations." "Queer performativity" has its own cultural power among those who know what "performativity" means. For the person in the street (or on the street corner), however, "queer" often remains, culturally and discursively speaking, a matter of style and rhetoric. It's popular with some young people and some academics, but its universalizing impulse is (designedly) at odds with its joyful claim of stigmatization. Precisely because of the ambivalently exclusive mantle of "chic," it's unlikely that "everybody's queer" will replace the cliche "everybody's bisexual" in the near future.

Garber, Marjorie. (2000). Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life.