Deep Gossip

Rating:
Summary: Subversively accessible queer thought
Review: Abelove considers topics as various as Freud, the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Bishop, Thoreau, queer students, and American Studies founder F.O. Mathiessen. But these essays are not a miscellany. They are the culmination of a careful mind's work of two decades, and model a method for queering history and culture that simply does without the polemics or technical jargon that typically characterize such projects. It is a book that repays careful reading, one that is short enough to be realistically re-read, and one clear and self-contained enough to be read without reference to a mountain of other academic texts.

Rating:
Summary: A moving, invigorating, and delightful read
Review: The slightness of Abelove's volume of essays belies the breadth of its reach and the enormous generosity of its insights, curiosities, and concerns. Some of the essays are, simply put, transformative--that on Freud makes us reconceptualize the founder of psychoanalysis, whose views on human sexuality turn out to differ notoriously from those, especially American, analysts who would claim to follow in his path. The essay on Thoreau similarly recovers this writer from a dominant (and domineering) tradition of domestication. Everywhere in his beautifully plain-spoken writing--whether it is on the demographics of 18th-century England or the critical reception of American Studies pioneer F.O. Mathiessen--Abelove quietly, gracefully, and compellingly overturns the received accounts we have of some of the crucial institutions and figures in the history of modern thought and culture. In addition to offering a richly rewarding entree into the history of sexuality, Abelove's work might best be seen as contributing mightily to a revisionist archeology of those common-sense assumptions that underwrite what we all take to be fundamental certainties and self-evident truths.

Rating:
Summary: A moving, invigorating, and delightful read
Review: The slightness of Abelove's volume of essays belies the breadth of its reach and the enormous generosity of its insights, curiosities, and concerns. Some of the essays are, simply put, transformative--that on Freud makes us reconceptualize the founder of psychoanalysis, whose views on human sexuality turn out to differ notoriously from those, especially American, analysts who would claim to follow in his path. The essay on Thoreau similarly recovers this writer from a dominant (and domineering) tradition of domestication. Everywhere in his beautifully plain-spoken writing--whether it is on the demographics of 18th-century England or the critical reception of American Studies pioneer F.O. Mathiessen--Abelove quietly, gracefully, and compellingly overturns the received accounts we have of some of the crucial institutions and figures in the history of modern thought and culture. In addition to offering a richly rewarding entree into the history of sexuality, Abelove's work might best be seen as contributing mightily to a revisionist archeology of those common-sense assumptions that underwrite what we all take to be fundamental certainties and self-evident truths.