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Futile Pleasures

Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility

By (author) Corey McEleney
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Fordham University Press, New York, United States
Published: 2nd Jan 2017
Dimensions: w 152mm h 229mm d 18mm
Weight: 506g
ISBN-10: 0823272656
ISBN-13: 9780823272655
Barcode No: 9780823272655
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Synopsis
Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature's potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

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"If the humanist defense of literature calls attention to the work of art, identifying aesthetic practice with the production of social value, then Corey McEleney's bold new book asks an indispensable question: Can art escape such coercive labor without making it escape the value it then labors to affirm? Identifying futility as the queer component in literary production, Futile Pleasures reimagines queer theory in relation to early modern thought. The result is a major work of criticism that contributes not only pleasurably, but also-we must admit it-valuably to debates in both of those fields." -- -Lee Edelman Tufts University