Reading Sideways ― The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

Lateral Aesthetics explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. It tracks the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also an engagement with political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and sexual expression. To track these engagements it performs an interpretive method Seitler calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of, and see in a new light, their connections, challenges, and productive frictions. By cultivating a counter-aesthetics of the unfinished, the uncertain, the small, the low, and the allusive, among other aesthetic categories, Seitler argues, these fictions recognized other ways of knowing and being than those oriented around reductively gendered accounts of beauty, classed imperatives established by the norms of taste, or apolitical treatises of sexual disinterestedness.

Dana Seitler is Associate Professor of American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.