Böcker av Jonathan Goldberg

Being of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality.Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot's engagement with Aristotle's theory of the soul and Empson's Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference.The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.

Saint Marks is a study based on the multiple representations of St. Mark, with a focus on Venetian Renaissance paintings and the gospel attributed to him, and theoretical work by philosophers and art historians who consider the afterlives of art works and our attachments to them. The life studied in this book is a materiality that exceeds human mortality.

These essays investigate the materiality of the world in Spenser, Cary and Marlowe; its sociability, sexuality and sovereignty in Shakespeare; and the universality of spirit, gender and empire in Vaughan, Donne and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rastanjani princess.

Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility and how melodrama as a whole provides queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories that regulate and constrain social life.

Translates one of the many ways in which Lucretius names the basic matter from which the world is made in De rerum natura. This book should be of concern to students of religion, and sexuality, especially as they impinge on questions of representation. It emphasizes the consequences for thinking about sexuality offered by Lucretian materialism.

In readings ranging from early-16th- through late-17th-century texts, this book aims to resituate women's writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in society and by their articulation of the desire to write.

With a focus on Willa Cather's artistic principle of "the thing not named," this book illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories-regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class-around which most recent Cather scholarship has focused.

Explores three social domains for textual production - the sixteenth-century English court as the location of high literariness; the theater, especially as a site for controversy around cross-dressing; and, the New World as the place where the slaughter of native populations was carried out in the name of ridding the hemisphere of sodomites.

A bold and important collection, surveying how the view of homosexual activities as socially dangerous has been perpetuated by the state, the church, the law and other institutions. A much- needed contribution to studies on sexuality.