TY - JOUR
T1 - Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals
T2 - Homophobia/Venice/History
AU - Champagne, John
N1 - Funding Information:
Both of these texts were published in the 1990s; both are likely to be familiar to Italianists in particular. A resident at the American Academy in Rome in 1981, Brodsky was posthumously honored in Italy by a 2011 tribute co-presented by the fellowship fund that bears his name, John Cabot University (an American university in Rome), The Casa delle Letterature/Comune di Roma, and the University of Rome La Sapienza; his Memorial Fellowship Fund grants two yearly fellowships that allow recipients to work and live in Italy for three months. Given the relative paucity of work in “queer” Italian studies in the United States in particular, both Sennett’s and Brodsky’s texts warrant further analysis. While the kind of critique I present here may strike some readers as familiar, I would venture to guess that it is still relatively uncommon in Italian studies, at least based on the admittedly anecdotal evidence of my own experience. Brodsky’s homophobia seems in particular to have gone largely unremarked.
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - Because works of nonfiction are always composed of literary tropes and metaphors, they have to be read critically for the ways in which their truth claims are potentially structured by ideologies and stereotypes. This essay reads passages from Richard Sennett's sociological analysis Flesh and Stone, The Body and the City in Western Civilization and Joseph Brodsky's memoir Watermark in order to demonstrate how these alleged works of nonfiction shore up some dishearteningly familiar literary stereotypes of male homosexuality and participate in a tradition, dating from the 19th century, of linking the city of Venice with homosexuality and death.
AB - Because works of nonfiction are always composed of literary tropes and metaphors, they have to be read critically for the ways in which their truth claims are potentially structured by ideologies and stereotypes. This essay reads passages from Richard Sennett's sociological analysis Flesh and Stone, The Body and the City in Western Civilization and Joseph Brodsky's memoir Watermark in order to demonstrate how these alleged works of nonfiction shore up some dishearteningly familiar literary stereotypes of male homosexuality and participate in a tradition, dating from the 19th century, of linking the city of Venice with homosexuality and death.
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U2 - 10.1080/00918369.2014.870844
DO - 10.1080/00918369.2014.870844
M3 - Article
C2 - 24423004
AN - SCOPUS:84900324444
SN - 0091-8369
VL - 61
SP - 923
EP - 939
JO - Journal of Homosexuality
JF - Journal of Homosexuality
IS - 7
ER -