Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon
Category: Books,New, Used & Rental Textbooks,Humanities
Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon Details
From the Inside Flap In a far-ranging series of readings that considers Italian humanism, art history, Elizabethan drama, early experimental science, and contemporary theory, Graham Hammill offers a new poetics of sexuality. Arguing against the reduction of sex to historical information, Hammill compels us to reconceive sexuality and its relationship to history through the aesthetic: he proposes that in Western encounters with homosexuality, the flesh emerges as both a problem and a promise at the limits of the visual and dramatic narrative arts. Sexuality and Form explores the insistence of the flesh as an element of carnality that resists exchange and conversion. Beginning with humanist aesthetics and the art of war, Hammill first discusses how the body gets aligned with various and subtle forms of violence. He then explores the epistemological and aesthetic spaces in the paintings of Caravaggio and Michaelangelo, the plays of Christopher Marlowe, and the scientific treatises of Francis Bacon, demonstrating how in each the flesh is bruised into visibility through poses that underwrite and belie ideals of secular civility. Sexuality and Form is an ambitious new study of sexuality, aesthetics, and epistemology—one of the first works of its kind to bring queer theory and psychoanalysis together within a Renaissance framework. Read more About the Author Graham L. Hammill is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Read more
Reviews
Hammill's book offers an interesting and much needed discussion of three important men relating issues of sexuality to the formation of their individual arts. Hammill presents his arguement in intriging and complex ways, greatly expanding the boundaries of his field and laying the groundwork for other scholars. I am surprised by the impassioned hatred of the other reviewer. They seem for some reason shocked that a book published by a University press, and using the line "Sexuality and Form is an ambitious new study of sexuality, aesthetics, and epistemology--one of the first works of its kind to bring queer theory and psychoanalysis together within a Renaissance framework" to describe itself should be written in academic language. This is a wonderful book for anyone who has taken college level art course and or ha studied lietrary/queer theory at the college level. Others might find it a bit opaque, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort you will be greatly rewarded. This is an academic study and is written in academic language, a language transparent to anyone trained to read it. I find it bemusing to read someone vilifying an academic book for being just that: academic. It's analogous to reading a pornographic novel and criticizing it for containing too much sex.
