Fat Art, Thin Art

by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential Tendencies , Epistemology of the Closet , and Between English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art , Sedgwick’s first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative.
Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick’s writing on some characteristic subjects and some new passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places—including Victorian novels—where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick’s poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academician specializing in literary criticism and feminist analysis; she is known as one of the architects of queer theory. Her works reflect an interest in queer performativity, experimental critical writing, non-Lacanian psychoanalysis, Buddhism and pedagogy, the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, and material culture, especially textiles and texture. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered purportedly hidden homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens, Henry James and Marcel Proust. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, coining the terms "antihomophobic" and "homosocial."

Reviews

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“(And now I’m scattered. Part of me, lines back,
addressed to you, is still wrestled
between refusal and love; and some part scuds ahead
plying across the fitful or sustained currents of narration
and gusty, then transparent, with relief as the distance from you
widens and clears.)”

[Karim · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What I would be when I grew up,
I never wondered that (maybe I knew that);
I wondered other things: if I'd be
sane. Loved.
But I did
Bend to divine one thing,
the fate of--"my talent." Shyly
as a big sister I would yearn
to trace its avocations, its vocations,
what it would want when it
grew up; what it would need the world to be.
Say I've abused, betrayed it a thousand times:
still I am grateful
there was even that bad way to care for the child."

this book was A+++

[Aolund · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t understand it all, but I liked it!

[Juliann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really glad to be finished this book. I found it pretentious and hard to follow. I appreciated certain bits and images, but there were so many things that I could not piece together. Maybe this is owing, in part, to the fact that the poems were written sporadically, over the course of a decade? Or maybe the style is characteristic of an 80s/90s movement in realist narrative that I’m totally unfamiliar with...

[Rubí · Rating 3 out of 5]

So much intimacy and vulnerability in her poetry. Probably something to revisit once i read more of her theory. Although i didn’t connect w some of it, enjoyed how she writes different ways of being with people.

[mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

eh. i feel like sedgwicks other work will speak to me a lot more than this did, it’s language would kind of fuck up the pace of my reading, which made a lot of the well written lines land a little bit less. i really reallly wanted to connect w this but ya.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"How Not to Be There," "Mobility, speech, sight," the next few poems in that cycle, and "Sexual Hum" are compelling. Not as into the rest.

[Liz Latty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting to read the poetry of someone I've always looked to as a theorist. She's wonderfully complex in all the right ways. Whatever that means. It means I liked it.