“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora: The Queer Politics of Literariness” traces the relation between the linguistic turn in literary studies and the emergence of queer theory. Showing how the advent of structuralism followed by the wide-spread dissemination of deconstruction, introduced a cultural anxiety about the separation of literary studies from its vitalizing social contexts, this talk examines the logic by which that separation got taken up by theorists of queer negativity and reframed precisely as a political response to the social order’s dominant values. Tracing this movement in the context of my own scholarly career, this talk brings out the ironic relation between the academy and the agora in a moment when the former is increasingly stigmatized as marginal and queer, and therefore, paradoxically, as of urgent concern to the latter.

Zoom link: us06web.zoom.us/j/81474961273?pwd=ftGpP4ikbYuxi2q4rwkLgOBrbdcyGH.1