Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

This chapter brings Sappho fr. 44V into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism. As part of its represention of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (aphthiton kleos) when this eminently heroic commodity is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. It is argued that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out.

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

This chapter focuses on Sappho fr. 1V and argues that as an attentive reader of the Iliad – and of the shame and humiliation experienced by its female characters, both divine and mortal – Sappho, rather than attempting to outdo Homer, or to contest his canonicity, amplifies and recasts “minor” episodes from Homeric epic. Her approach is neither overtly competitive with, nor subservient to, the older poet in that she does not aim to recreate the contours and feel of the original. Instead, in a manner designed to make visible what epic suppresses, she returns us to some of the Iliad’s marginal and dismissed characters, showing us the generative potential of painful experiences, such as Aphrodite’s defeat in Iliad 5 at the hands of Diomedes, and her feelings of shame as she is rebuked by the mortal warrior and demeaned by her father, Zeus. The consolation of her mother, Dione’s, reparative embrace anticipates the similar sort of “repair” Sappho herself, as named speaker of her “Ode to Aphrodite” finds in that poem’s evocation of Aphrodite.

Together with Chapter 1, this chapter helps contextualize the closer readings and case studies that follow by providing an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and post-critique) within which it emerged over the past several decades. It also discusses some of the key features of Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading, including shame, materiality, queer futures, and the oscillation between paranoid and reparative positions.

Chapter 1 discusses a constellation of texts that use satire to challenge the system of taste: Richard Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger; Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”; and Virginia Woolf’s essays “On Being Ill,” “Middlebrow,” and A Room of One’s Own. Though they precede Bourdieu’s Distinction by decades, these texts demonstrate their authors’ awareness of the ways aesthetic and gustatory taste are both acculturated and intertwined, and they use the slippage between these two forms of taste to denaturalize both. The systems of gustatory and aesthetic taste are challenged by the events narrated within each of these texts, and they challenge, too, the system of genres that defines satire as a mode that works against its objects. In these texts, satire is not just a way of maneuvering within or distancing oneself from a social system but a perversely reparative mode that reveals the pleasure that can inhere in resisting, failing, or working against one: the pleasure of liking “bad” foods, the pleasure of feeling too much, the pleasure of satire that embraces the sensation of being wrong.

This introduction outlines the aims of Virtual Play to propose an alternative mode of literary engagement to existing forms of historicist, aesthetic, and ideological criticism, especially those which have fallen under the label of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. It defines the book’s use of the terms ‘play’ and ‘virtual’, especially in relation to recent theoretical and philosophical work around these topics, establishes the stakes of a new, more vicarious criticism, and justifies why the novel form in the mid-nineteenth century is an especially productive intersection for this practice. It explains the structure of the book, and provides an outline of the argument within each chapter.

Most previous discussions of Ezra Pound, gender and sexuality have focused on Pound’s poetic depictions of women and his relationships with women artists, patrons and muses. The fascinating biographical stories include such figures as the poet H. D., perhaps Pound’s first love; the pianist and patron Margaret Cravens, who took her life after playing a song Pound and Walter Rummel wrote for her; Pound’s wife, Dorothy (Shakespear) Pound; and his long-time mistress, Olga Rudge, a concert violinist. When critics focus on sexuality and Pound, the result tends to be ‘paranoid’ rather than ‘reparative’ readings, to use Eve Sedgwick’s famous formulation.