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Modernist Poetics and Queer Fruit
Forbidden fruit has long been a convenient metaphor for illicit knowledge and sexuality, a trope easily traced to the garden of Eden. Modernist poets deployed this familiar figure in new ways, insisting on the fleshy materiality of fruit as a way of representing other forms of fleshly pleasure. In her recent book, "Edible Arrangements: Modernism's Queer Forms," Clark University professor Elizabeth Blake examines this phenomenon as part of a larger exploration of the ways queer consumption restructures modernist literary forms. In this talk, Blake focuses on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and H. D.’s “Priapus” to discuss the way modernist poets disrupt lyric traditions by setting intertextuality and phenomenological referentiality in tension in order to explore queer experience.
Admission is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Guests are encouraged to arrive at 1:15pm for refreshments.
This event is sponsored by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Department of English at Clark University.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2877049-0
