Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Long Players
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://petercoviello.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 S. Morgan St. (M/C 162), Chicago, IL 60607-7120, Phone: 312.413.2200
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2003056379
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2003056379
HEADING: Coviello, Peter
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372 __ |a Gay and lesbian studies |2 lcsh
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373 __ |a Bowdoin College |2 naf
373 __ |a Cornell University |2 naf |t 1998
373 __ |a Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.) |2 naf |t 1993
374 __ |a Professor
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670 __ |a Whitman, Walt. Memoranda during the war, c2004: |b CIP t.p. (Peter Coviello)
670 __ |a Tomorrow’s parties, 2013: |b t.p. (Peter Coviello) page 253 (Professor of English, Bowdoin College; director of programs in gay and lesbian studies and africana studies; author)
670 __ |a Bowdoin, website viewed 13 May 2013 |b (Peter Coviello, professor of English, Bowdoin College; Ph. D., Cornell University, 1998; B.A., Northwestern University, 1993; author)
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PERSONAL
Married (marriage ended); children: two stepdaughters.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, B.A., 1993; Cornell University, Ph. D., 1998.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, assistant professor, 1998-2004, associate professor, 2004-11, professor of English, 2011-14, chair, Program in Gay and Lesbian Studies, 2002-06, acting director, Program in Africana Studies, 2006-08, chair of English department, 2010-12; University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, professor of English, 2014–, member, Institute for Advanced Studies, 2017-18. Visiting associate professor of English, Northwestern University, 2009.
AWARDS:Lambda Literary Award finalist 2013, and Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize honorable mention, Modern Language Association GL/Q Caucus, 2014, both for Tomorrow’s Parties.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, edited by Joseph Allen Boone, et al., University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2000; The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. 4, edited by Jay Parini, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004; Shakesqueer: The Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Madhavi Menon, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2010; Melville and Aesthetics, edited by Geoff Sanborn and Samuel Otter, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2011; Should I Go to Graduate School? 41 Answers to an Impossible Question, edited by Jessica Loudis et al., Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2014; Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2014; The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, edited by Mikko Tuhkanen and Ellen McCallum, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2014. Contributor to periodicals, including American Literature, Early American Literature, English Literary History, ESC: English Studies in Canada, European Journal of American Studies, GLQ, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanist, JPMS: Journal of Popular Music Studies, LARB Quarterly Journal, MLQ – Modern Language Quarterly, PMLA, Raritan, Social Text: Periscope, and Studies in American Fiction. Coeditor, “After the Postsecular,” American Literature (special edition), December, 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
University of Illinois English professor Peter Coviello specializes in the study of nineteenth-century American literature. He has edited works by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Winthrop, and he is the author of the monographs Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature, and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-century America, and of the music-criticism memoir Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs.
Intimacy in America
In Intimacy in America, Coviello looks at the way in which concepts of intimacy and race bound a highly-divided country together in the years before the Civil War. “Coviello uses the term ‘intimacy’ to cover a lot of ground–from sexual desire to sympathetic friendship to community cohesiveness to nationalist belonging,” declared Peter Molin in Studies in American Fiction. “For a range of antebellum authors dissatisfied with the claims of the state,” the author stated in the introduction to Intimacy in America, “American nation-ness existed, and had meaning, as a kind of relation—for some, an intimacy—that bound together a scattered, anonymous citizenry; and that the language of race, with its progressively escalating aggrandizement of whiteness, provided one powerful way to realize this unlikely dream, that of an intimate nationality.”
Coviello also suggests that intimacy—in the form of close friendship or even sexual relations—also played an important role in defining nineteenth-century America. “Coviello invokes Foucault to claim that in the mid-nineteenth century–the period of his focus–traditional definitions of sexually-charged terms blurred and altered,” said Molin. “The various shades of meanings gave texts such as Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass resonance in their time and continue to intrigue us today. Indeed, Intimacy in America is most interesting not when addressing matters of nationality and race, but when confronting subjects long the source of speculation and titillation.” “Intimacy in America … compellingly articulate[s] the erotic suggestiveness discoverable at many points in America’s classic literature,” Molin concluded, “and politicize[s] it by linking it to conceptions of national identity.” Coviello’s study “breaks new ground,” concluded A.M. Laflen in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, “in theorizations of temporality for those working in queer theory, gender studies, and 19th-century literature.”
Tomorrow's Parties
In Tomorrow’s Parties, Coviello looks at twentieth-century American writers reflecting back on the nineteenth century as a time in which gender identity—especially in the forms of homosexuality and heterosexuality—had not taken firm root in the American psyche. “If the hetero/homo division we continue to live with today was ‘invented’ little more than a hundred years ago,” asked Coviello in the introduction to Tomorrow’s Parties, “then what exactly did erotic life look like in that bygone era for which [Henry] James expresses his melancholic nostalgia, before the hardening of such a distinction into the stuff of present-day common sense? How, and in in what terms were nineteenth-century subjects able to imagine the parameters of sexuality? To ask that most Jamesian of questions: What could be counted as sexuality? What it a circumscribed set of bodily practices? A form of identification?”
In this study the University of Illinois professor sets out to understand how nineteenth century literature addressed (or, more significantly, failed to address) the concept of sexuality. Sexuality, as Henry James hints in the letter that leads off Coviello’s monograph, is an invention that did not exist when he was young—so how did the nineteenth century address ideas like homo- and heterosexuality? “Coviello … undertakes a formidable task: recovering the optimistic register of failed or foreclosed futures and the radical possibilities latent in half-articulated visions of social life,” wrote Nathan Wolff in Nineteenth-century Literature. “His book’s many successes … stem from this feat of counterfactual historicization, examining authors … who resist a sexuality that had not yet arrived to be refused and anticipate other styles of erotic and social life that never came to be…. Tomorrow’s Parties thus dwells by necessity in the realm of near misses, glimpses, and connotations.” “Without minimizing gains achieved through the political and social recognition of non-normative sexualities, or ignoring anxieties and sufferings endured for lack of such recognition during the period he examines,” stated M. Luke Bresky in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, “Coviello works hardest to sound the meaningful imaginative possibilities that remained uncircumscribed in a pre-sexological American culture.” “Tapping into the dream life of writers as different as Frederick Douglass and the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith,” assessed Vivian Pollak in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, “Coviello examines the wounds inflicted by traditional marriage plots, and some chapters, including the one on Jewett, attend to forms of sociality that push beyond the limits of the merely human. Tomorrow’s Parties invites us to reimagine personal and national narratives we thought we knew. Read this deeply felt book carefully. It is a bravura performance, and you won’t be sorry.”
Long Players
In Long Players, Coviello explores the ways in which certain songs speak to him at a difficult point in his life. Newly divorced, he heads off to Europe trying to forget his grief over his loss, but popular music plunges him back into despair. “Madrid is where I started to figure something out,” Coviello stated in Long Players, “something I’d been carrying around with me long before I met Evany, long before we made a little family in Maine with two small girls—my sudden stepdaughters—and a little house, and a garden tucked behind a stand of pine trees. It was around then, I think, that I began to contend with the possibility that … I did not have quite the language I needed to say just what it was I thought songs did, or why I believed in them in the … not entirely defensible way I did.”
“While some other High Fidelity-inspired memoirs undoubtedly ‘do’ the music better,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “few outpace the grim vivacity of Coviello’s writing or match the depth of feeling he summons from … his own neuroses.” “Coviello,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “flings himself into a search for some kind of reassurance that, even without [love], his life is not over.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Coviello, Peter, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2005.
Coviello, Peter, Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2018.
Coviello, Peter, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-century America, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2013.
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2013, A.M. Laflen, review of Tomorrow’s Parties, p. 257.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, January, 2016, Vivian Pollak, review of Tomorrow’s Parties, p. 170
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of Long Players.
Library Journal, October 15, 2004, Michael Rogers, review of Memoranda during the War, p. 99.
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, fall, 2016, M. Luke Bresky, review of Tomorrow’s Parties, p. 73.
Nineteenth-century Literature, March, 2015, Nathan Wolff, review of Tomorrow’s Parties, p. 547.
Publishers Weekly, February 12, 2018, review of Long Players, p. 66.
Studies in American Fiction, autumn, 2006, Peter Molin review of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature, p. 251.
ONLINE
Peter Coviello website, http://petercoviello.com (August 1, 2018), author profile.
Peter Coviello has written about Walt Whitman, Mormon polygamy, Steely Dan, the history of sexuality, queer children, American literature, stepparenthood, and Prince. This work has appeared in The Believer, Frieze, Avidly, Raritan, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in several books. In 2017–18, he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He lives in Chicago.
Print Marked Items
Coviello, Peter: LONG PLAYERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Coviello, Peter LONG PLAYERS Penguin (Adult Nonfiction) $16.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-0-14-313233-2
A heartfelt and hyperliterate take on love as a mixtape.
Coviello (English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, 2013, etc.) tells the story
of recovering from his life's greatest loss to date: the breakup of his marriage and family. A sheltered young English professor, the author met and
married an older woman with children. Her affair with a co-worker a few years later shattered his world and left him in the precarious, nonlegal
role of ex-stepfather to her two daughters. Coviello recounts memories in the present tense, and the 18 songs of the title prove closer to 30, with
each chapter evoking a few pop songs that trigger memories surrounding the dissolution of his marriage. His sincerity is by turns insufferable and
irresistible, but he is a true believer in the power of love and in the magic of certain pop songs to encapsulate, transform, infect, and heal. His
personal compilation mixes tunes that remind him of his bewitchingly broken ex-wife, Evany, with songs that evoke his feelings as a suburban
man learning to love and be loved by other people, plus a few tracks for the loyal friends who picked him up each time he collapsed in grief. With
its convoluted syntax and attenuated musings about love and the inner life, Coviello's style imitates his heroes Henry James and George Eliot, and
reading his book feels a bit like finding a cache of letters from one close friend to another, with the writer casually unraveling on the page.
Summing up one's life in a list of carefully chosen tracks has developed into something of a microgenre, with pop songs serving as the
madeleines for the last pre-digital generation. While some other High Fidelity-inspired memoirs undoubtedly "do" the music better, few outpace
the grim vivacity of Coviello's writing or match the depth of feeling he summons from the soundtrack of his own neuroses.
A diary of devastation too good not to share.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Coviello, Peter: LONG PLAYERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700342/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a6f9c39. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700342
Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs
Publishers Weekly.
265.7 (Feb. 12, 2018): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs
Peter Coviello. Penguin, $16 trade paper
(272p) ISBN 978-0-14-313233-2
Music-obsessed academic Coviello (Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America) writes episodically about music
and his failing marriage while living in a small college town in Maine. The book's structure and the author's love of 1990s indie bands can't help
evoking Rob Sheffield's Love Is a Mixtape, though Coviello's is a more sprawling, tempestuous affair, hurtling through the giddy peaks and
darkened valleys of the bar-crawling years following his divorce. Coviello has a lot to say about music, ranging from the pocket epiphanies that
occur to him while listening to the Wedding Present's song "Dalliance" while wandering Madrid in a heartbroken trance (the band's music is for
those who "like arguments made mostly of enormous distorted sound") to the regenerative joys of listening to sublimely smooth pop like Carly
Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" with one of his ex-stepdaughters. But this is a book also about love, and Coviello flings himself into a search for
some kind of reassurance that, even without it, his life is not over. The chronicle of overeager romances on his postdivorce travels have all the
shimmering choruses and gloomy in-between patches of the songs he listens to. It's an exhausting trip to take, but it's also memorably passionate.
(June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs." Publishers Weekly, 12 Feb. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528615518/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae3b6670. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528615518
Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War
Michael Rogers
Library Journal.
129.17 (Oct. 15, 2004): p99.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
WHITMAN, WALT. Memoranda During the War. Oxford Univ. Dec. 2004. c.224p. ed. by Peter Coviello. ISBN 0-19-516793-7. $25. HIST
In 1862, Whitman traveled from Brooklyn, NY, to Virginia to look for his battle-wounded brother George. The trip offered him a front-row seat to
the horrors of the Civil War. He spoke to many soldiers and others involved and put together this volume, which he published privately in 1876 in
an edition of 100 copies. Some of the material later was worked into newspaper articles and other books, but this volume, reedited by scholar
Peter Coviello, includes it all.
Rogers, Michael
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rogers, Michael. "Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2004, p. 99. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A124007729/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aea6295c. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A124007729
Coviello, Peter. Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature
Peter Molin
Studies in American Fiction. 34.2 (Autumn 2006): p251+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Johns Hopkins University Press
http://www.press.jhu.edu
Full Text:
Coviello, Peter. Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature. Minneapolis and London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005. xii + 229 pp. Cloth: $60.00. Paper: $20.00.
Erkkila, Betsy. Mixed Blood and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii + 272 pp. Cloth: $55.00.
Peter Coviello's Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature(2005) and Betsy Erkkila's Mixed Blood and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (2005) explore the representation of interpersonal and group emotional attachment in classic American texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Coviello and Erkkila suggest that queer, interracial, and illicit sexual desire underwrites literary depictions of sympathetic identification and group cohesiveness. Further, each argues that portrayals of non-normative erotic desire perform a complicated dance with racialist and nationalist sentiments. Connecting literary artistry with cultural imperatives, Coviello and Erkkila assert that many canonical American authors explore the idea that the true promise of democracy entails a radical expansion of sexual norms. Specifically, they suggest that sexual desires that dared not speak their names inform our classic authors' conceptions of white male political solidarity.
In Intimacy in America, Coviello uses the term "intimacy" to cover a lot of ground--from sexual desire to sympathetic friendship to community cohesiveness to nationalist belonging. Coviello invokes Foucault to claim that in the mid-nineteenth century--the period of his focus--traditional definitions of sexually-charged terms blurred and altered. The various shades of meanings gave texts such as Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass resonance in their time and continue to intrigue us today. Indeed, Intimacy in America is most interesting not when addressing matters of nationality and race, but when confronting subjects long the source of speculation and titillation: Poe's pedophilia, the homoeroticism of Moby-Dick, and the masculine promiscuity of Whitman's "adhesiveness."
Regarding Poe, Coviello begins at a familiar site: the frightening portrayals of adult gender erotics in stories such as "The Fall of the House of Usher." Drawing on poems such as "Annabel Lee," Coviello suggests that Poe found safer emotional ground depicting unconsummated relationships between men and young women. From this relatively solid beginning Coviello speculates about Poe's attitudes on race and nationalism. The estrangement between sexes, Coviello claims, furnishes the logic by which we can understand Poe's racism: "[A]s women are incontestably and absolutely different from men, so are whites absolutely different from blacks" (83). These forbidding boundary lines in place, Coviello asserts that Poe found nationalist sentiment among white males equally horrible, perhaps even impossible, to contemplate: "Poe has no register in which to describe any bond between persons--let alone a bond extending mysteriously between unsuspecting strangers--that is not fundamentally terrifying" (89). Thus, Coviello ends somewhat flatly, Poe's relative quiet on the literary and political nationalism issues that engrossed peers such as Evert Duyckinck and William Gilmore Simms.
Coviello raises the stakes when he turns to Melville. A chapter entitled "Bowels and Fear: Nationalism, Sodomy, and Whiteness in MobyDick," reiterates arguments first made by D. H. Lawrence that Melville troubled antebellum beliefs in white supremacy. Coviello advances this argument by suggesting that Melville early in Moby-Dick explores the notion that homosexual affinity might serve better than race consciousness to conceptualize a united citizenry. For evidence, Coviello cites Ishmael and Queequeg's odd friendship and the eroticized fraternity of the Pequod's crew. Coviello asserts, however, that Melville ultimately forecloses on this vision of sexually-charged male solidarity. Ahab's galvanizing of the crew to chase the white whale, Coviello writes, demonstrates the "terrific power of whiteness as a vehicle for unyielding social allegiance" (125-26), and the Pequod's destruction at story's end the inevitable consequence of such a pursuit.
In Intimacy in America's most provocative chapter, "Loving Strangers," Coviello asserts that Whitman also used homosexual desire to help imagine national collective feeling among white males. Coviello claims that understanding the pervasive literalness with which Whitman portrays male-to-male physical attraction "perfectly" and "magisterially" (148) explains much that is either obscure or has been suppressed by generations of "priggish" (149) critics. Most significantly, this "gay recognition" (147) allows us to see that something akin to our contemporary notion of "cruising" (155) is afoot in Whitman's frequent portraits of fleeting but intense contacts between male strangers. These moments, claims Coviello, underwrite Whitman's vision of the "utopian relation of citizen to citizen--the relations, that is, of nationality" (155).
Erkkila, in Mixed Blood and Other Crosses, is interested in many of the same issues, authors, and texts as Coviello, and even more aggressively asserts their complicity in establishing a nefarious white male patriarchy. Examining texts ranging from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia to Emily Dickinson's poetry, Erkkila seeks out "scenes of mixture and crossing, miscegenation and incest, doubling and hybridity, inversion and rehearsal" (ix). Understanding such passages as revelations of "phobias and fantasies," she argues that images of "blood mixture and contamination" (xi) are fixtures in the nation's collective imagination. Embedded but suppressed in our individual and national psyches, these anxieties reinforce a political inequity in which "dark, savage, sexual, and alien others" are marginalized by the "disciplinary logic of the Western Enlightenment and its legacy of blood in the Americas" (xii).
This phenomenon, Erkkila posits, found original expression in Jefferson's efforts to catalog the natural, demographic, and cultural features of Virginia. Eager to demonstrate the superiority of American republicanism, Jefferson was sure he might "constitute and fix men, bodies, sexualities, races, laws, and nationalities" (61) on behalf of a white male aristocracy. But, claims Erkkila, the difficulty of defining the new nation's "fluid, unsettled, and still contested meanings" (61) unsettled Jefferson as he wrote. In particular, Jefferson was spooked by the fact of miscegenation and acutely aware--how could he not be?--of its frequent occurrence at Monticello. The result, according to Erkkila, was a paranoiac subtext within the Notes in which Jefferson wrestles with the fact that white racial purity and, hence, white cultural authority, has already been compromised.
In Erkkila's view, Poe's project was much the same. Arguing that Poe's art for art's sake ethos and notions of purity and beauty were grounded in a cultural inclination to valorize whiteness, she claims that Poe tried to "create forms of white beauty, white art, white writing, and white culture against and beyond time, history, the body, the black, the other" (104). Fear of black bodies and sexuality energized Poe's "aestheticization of whiteness" (104) and underlies many depictions of terrifying blackness in the poetry and fiction. Poe's agenda had nationalist implications, according to Erkkila. An attempt to "unite a fractured nation and an increasingly atomized world on the common ground of culture," Poe's concept of pure beauty "cannot finally be separated from the question of race and the ongoing historical struggle over the color of American skin" (127).
Turning to Whitman, Erkkila argues even more strenuously than Coviello that both Whitman's poetics and vision of national solidarity depended on queer sexual desire. "I want to argue that Whitman's sexual love of men cannot be separated from his work and vision as the poet of American democracy" (133) she writes. She has the pictures to prove it, too--a discussion of the "chum" (149) photographs Whitman had taken of himself with much younger male friends is fascinating. Erkkila has a keen sense of the stakes involved in polemically asserting that understanding Whitman depends on recognition of his queer poetics. Scholars and teachers have long addressed or avoided as they saw fit the biographical question of Whitman's sexual desire. Now, according to Erkkila (and Coviello, too), not acknowledging the queer in the text represents a failure to fully explain Whitman's vision of America. Contentious as this idea may or may not be in scholarly circles, Erkkila documents how it is already beginning to play out explosively at the level of museum exhibits and public ceremonies honoring Whitman. The initial returns are not promising: curators and officials will go to great lengths to suppress anything that impinges on the public memory of Whitman as the "good gray poet."
Erkkila's fiery language sometimes troubles, but overall hers is a richer, more compelling study than Coviello's. Chapters that take advantage of the "Other Crosses" portion of her title especially excel. For example, a discussion of Abigail Adams and Phyllis Wheatley posits a literary and cultural high point of possibility in the early republic just before the forces of patriarchy consolidated their power. Erkkila also engagingly, if maliciously, exposes Dickinson as an aristocratic enemy of the mob and the market. The conclusion of Mixed Blood and Other Crosses traces the career and writings of C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian Melville scholar whose politically-charged, cosmopolitan criticism Erkkila finds admirable.
Poised at the intersection of queer and whiteness studies, Intimacy in America and Mixed Blood and Other Crosses advance theses that stimulate and provoke. At times, however, each author speculates on somewhat sketchy evidence or premises. Coviello's assertion that Moby-Dick's "sodomitical" (120) vision collapses when Pip prays that God "preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear" (123)--with a heavy emphasis on the word "bowels" to connote anal erotics--seems labored. For her part, Erkkila claims that Poe's raven expresses the "cultural terror of the black body" (123), yet sidesteps extended discussion of the equally terrifying white body at the end of Pym.
Quibbles aside, Intimacy in America and Mixed Blood and Other Crosses compellingly articulate the erotic suggestiveness discoverable at many points in America's classic literature and politicize it by linking it to conceptions of national identity.
Peter Molin
United States Military Academy at West Point
Molin, Peter
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Molin, Peter. "Coviello, Peter. Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature." Studies in American Fiction, vol. 34, no. 2, 2006, p. 251+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A160422340/AONE?u=lom_oakcc&sid=AONE&xid=b7e75314. Accessed 4 Aug. 2018.
Coviello, Peter. Tomorrow's parties: sex and the untimely in nineteenth-century America
A.M. Laflen
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 51.2 (Oct. 2013): p257+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org.portal.oaklandcc.edu/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
51-0717
PS217
2012-35344 CIP
Coviello, Peter. Tomorrow's parties: sex and the untimely in nineteenth-century America. New York University, 2013. 252p index afp ISBN 9780814717400, $75.00; ISBN 9780814717417 pbk, $24.00
In Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (CH, Feb'06, 43-3254), Coviello (Bowdoin College) offered a rereading of canonical 19th-century authors, focused on the problematic role that race played in constructing a sense of Americanness. Coviello returns with an even more ambitious reexamination of 19th-century literature, focused on exploring what counted as sexuality during this period. Considering works by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass, and writing by Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Coviello aims to disrupt views of the 19th century as primarily anticipating the development of modern taxonomies of sexuality. Instead, he examines "errant possibilities for imagining sex that have sunk into a kind of muteness with the advent of modern sexuality." Coviello explicates texts and passages in which sexuality is represented as distinctly different from the modern regime of sexual specification, whether it is Thoreau's descriptions of "exquisite carnal ravishment by sound" or Smith's attempt to pursue "enlargement" via plural marriage. This book breaks new ground in theorizations of temporality for those working in queer theory, gender studies, and 19th-century literature. Summing Up: Essential. **** Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.---A. M. Laflen, Marist College
Laflen, A.M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Laflen, A.M. "Coviello, Peter. Tomorrow's parties: sex and the untimely in nineteenth-century America." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2013, p. 257+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A347001935/AONE?u=lom_oakcc&sid=AONE&xid=2c096cce. Accessed 4 Aug. 2018.
Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America
M. Luke Bresky
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. 42.2 (Fall 2016): p73+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Nathaniel Hawthorne Society
http://www.tamiu.edu/hawthorne/review.shtml
Full Text:
Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. By Peter M. Coviello, New York: New York UP, 2013. 265 pp. $89.00 hardcover/$26.00 paper.
Tomorrow's Parties examines a wide variety of texts by American writers whose work preceded and, in complex ways, anticipated the Modern articulation of sexuality in identitarian, hetero-/homo-terms. Contributing to significant recent (post-Foucaultian) work on temporality by Americanists specializing in queer studies, Coviello's detailed, subtly theorized readings reveal how sensitively American writers of the nineteenth century and fin-de-siecle registered "the encroachment of a new regime of sexual specification" (4), and how they resisted it in their emphasis--widely diverse as to motivation and effect.--on the less codified, less constrainingly legible intimacies of the erotic. Without minimizing gains achieved through the political and social recognition of non-normative sexualities, or ignoring anxieties and sufferings endured for lack of such recognition during the period he examines, Coviello works hardest to sound the meaningful imaginative possibilities that remained uncircumscribed in a pre-sexological American culture. If, as he argues convincingly, wary intimations of impending sexual classification marked that culture more pervasively than specialists in literary history and queer studies have so far recognized, then his own wariness of a "triumphalist presentism" concerning the advent of sexual identification seems well-warranted. Crucial nuances--crucial queernesses--would get lost in translation, certainly, if the diverse desires, prospects, pleasures, freedoms, directions and indirections that this book traces with such care were assimilated transhistorically into a conceptual language not yet spoken by the authors who voiced them.
Resisting sexual legibility may not necessarily entail a resistance to textual legibility, but the intricacies of Coviello's texts (by Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Jewett, Douglass, [Joseph] Smith, Melville, Jacobs, Hawthorne, and James) repay the generous, incisively tactful close readings that he devotes to them. As Coviello observes in defense of his approach, "it is by dwelling with texture, rhythm and pulse, accretion and dispersal--the specific atmospheres of a given work's language, which come clearest in long exposure--that we can best begin to articulate those more errant, more uncoded stories of sexual possibility" (19). Tomorrow's Parties delivers on this promise of descriptive precision, and the result is no less useful and provocative if some chapters seem inevitably tantalizing, working as they do in an archive of tantalizing experiences. Striving to capture what was still only possible to articulate, still on the tip of the tongue, when the codification of what we now call sexuality was already making itself felt, already tending to forestall that possible articulation, the explication of untimeliness proves at once elusive and transgressive.
In Chapter Five, "The Tenderness of Beasts," Coviello assesses The Blithedale Romance as "one of the great American novels about homophobia" (148), engaging the consensus view of this novel as a characteristically, if sometimes compassionately, conservative satire. Simultaneously, the forms of "tender passion" unleashed at Blithedale--intimacy, attraction, love--excite Hawthorne's narrator sexually and influence him politically, triggering escalating dread and panicked flight. The sexual freedom that terrifies Coverdale remains stubbornly and revealingly linked with broader antebellum ambivalences about freedom in general; and the high political stakes of this entanglement make a central case for the importance of Tomorrow's Parties. But any of this book's chapters (ten, introduction and section codas included), could supply similarly compelling evidence.
M. Luke Bresky
St. Mary's University
Bresky, M. Luke
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bresky, M. Luke. "Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America." Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, p. 73+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A477339815/AONE?u=lom_oakcc&sid=AONE&xid=f3e5fb53. Accessed 4 Aug. 2018.
Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America
Vivian Pollak
Journal of the History of Sexuality. 25.1 (Jan. 2016): p170+.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org.portal.oaklandcc.edu/10.7560/JHS25107
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress
Full Text:
Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. By Peter Coviello. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. 252. $85.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).
Is it possible to say anything new at this time in queer literary history about Emily Dickinson's experience and imagination of same-sex love? Peter Coviello thinks that it is. Following robust chapters on Thoreau and Whitman, he offers us a "Coda" (subtitled "A Little Destiny") in which Dickinson to some extent functions as an appendage to these disappointed lovers. Dickinson, he notes, "can sound a lot like the young Thoreau: impassioned, in possession of a talent for figure and a seemingly inexhaustible lexical playfulness ... very often finding in silence an ampler field for intimate avowal than in the constraints of speech" (65).
How, then, does silence play out in a letter Dickinson wrote to her beloved friend Susan Gilbert when both women were twenty-one? Quite nicely, as it turns out, because Dickinson yearns for her friend's soulful and bodily presence, for a communion in which '"we need not talk at all'" (66). Quoting from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Coviello treats Dickinson's letter to her dearest "Susie" as a prose poem in which the speaker "make[s] ardor precious by counterpoising it to the unpredictable swiftness of mortal separation" (66). (1) To make ardor precious is to affirm the unappeasable power of longing, longing for which "the world's language" (to quote Dickinson's letter) is woefully insufficient.
At times Tomorrow's Parties itself reads like a prose poem, and I am reluctant to translate its tender, exuberant language into a dryer idiom. Yet by concentrating on a single letter written well before Dickinson had reached her poetic prime, Coviello minimizes her development. How, then, did time affect Dickinson's imagination of love once Susie had returned to Amherst and settled down next door? More specifically, what happened after Susan married the poet's brother in July 1856, when both women were twenty-five? Decades ago, Lillian Faderman suggested that after Dickinson could no longer give Susan her love, she gave her art. (2) Would Coviello go there?
Not exactly. If Coviello's Dickinson lived with the awful knowledge that every future is "too late" for love (67), she also participated in an obsessional attempt to sublimate her grief through art. Paradoxically, Coviello affirms the sublimation narrative the earlier Dickinson resisted when he describes her as engaging in a "decades-long outflowing of writings to 'Susie'" (67). In this sense, Coviello creates an emotionally simplified narrative in which Dickinson lives out of time. Does she give up hope? Not exactly. "Indeed," he writes, "I think one strong way to frame the decades-long outflowing of writings to 'Susie' is to understand them as an extended parsing of what is, for Dickinson, a bedeviling, sometimes anguishing question.... Where can two women love one another? Where can two nineteenth-century American women be present to one another in the full breath of their devotion, their need, and their ardor?" (67). The trouble with Coviello's tragically impassioned narrative is that it narrows and dehistoricizes Dickinson. All that matters is Susan and personal narcissism. Dickinson's sense of audience, I submit, was broader.
If Dickinson is "frozen in the alembic of an unyielding grief' (74), the fault lies not with her but with the conditions of life in nineteenth-century America. Because she was a woman, her opportunities for erotic fulfillment outside of marriage were more limited than were those of Thoreau and Whitman. She was more bound to "brute biology" (75). Coviello's Dickinson accepts no compromises, which is why she turns to death and to eternity for answers to the problem of living unloved.
If for Dickinson tomorrow's party with Susan can occur only after the death of the body, does that mean that lesbian women in nineteenth-century America were similarly doomed? Coviello opens the second part of his book with a chapter called "Islanded: Sarah Orne Jewett and the Uncompanioned Life." This chapter is so rich in its attentiveness to the complexity of same-sex bonds that I am again reluctant to translate its vision of what is possible into a more limited idiom. Suffice it to say that the chapter attends not only to the erotics of loss in The Country of the Pointed Firs but also to cross-gender bonds that sustain the narrator and the narrative. Coviello offers detailed analyses of the history of Jewett criticism and responds fully to arguments developed by others, including Heather Love in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. (3) He offers us a lyrical celebration of Firs' eccentrics, and my favorite moment was this: "To say that some people are most wholly themselves outside the embrace of any sociability ... is to suggest that the recurring vision of uncompanioned, islanded life is for Jewett not solely the stuff of nightmares" (97).
Tapping into the dream life of writers as different as Frederick Douglass and the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Coviello examines the wounds inflicted by traditional marriage plots, and some chapters, including the one on Jewett, attend to forms of sociality that push beyond the limits of the merely human. Tomorrow's Parties invites us to reimagine personal and national narratives we thought we knew. Read this deeply felt book carefully. It is a bravura performance, and you won't be sorry.
DOI: 10.7560/JHS25107
VIVIAN POLLAK
Washington University in St. Louis
(1) See Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, ed. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998).
(2) See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981). See also "Emily Dickinson's Letters to Sue Gilbert," Massachusetts Review 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 197-225.
(3) See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Polities of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pollak, Vivian. "Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America." Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, p. 170+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A440820711/AONE?u=lom_oakcc&sid=AONE&xid=9b57f341. Accessed 4 Aug. 2018.