Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper

by Diarmuid Hester

Overview

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post­-War avant-garde.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609386917
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	06/01/2020
Series:	New American Canon
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Diarmuid Hester is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow in English at the University of Cambridge and a college research associate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His writing has appeared in American Literature, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Journal of American Studies, Critical Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, gorse, and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Wrong | The Adolescence of an Iconoclast 1

2 Sturm und Drang | Rimbaud and Sade 23

3 A Poetics of Dissociability | The Punk Poets of Los Angeles 43

4 "I'm Yours" | Frank O'Hara, Paul Goodman, and The Tenderness of the Wolves 63

5 Safe and the Aesthetics of Distance 77

6 "If There Actually Is Such a Thing as New Narrative …" 91

7 "Fuck Sexual Conformity" | Anarcho-Homo Radicalism in the 1980s 111

8 The George Miles Cycle 127

9 JT LeRoy and My Loose Thread | "I Had No Other Choice" 165

10 The Automated and the Eerie | Collaborations with Gisèle Vienne 183

11 Dennis Cooper's Blog 201

12 Reading for Queer Subculture in The Marbled Swarm 231

13 Asignifying Desire | HTML Novels and Feature Films 247

Afterword | Starting with Friendship 267

Notes 271

Bibliography 293

Index 313

What People are Saying About This

Wayne Koestenbaum

“Diarmuid Hester unfurls a riveting chronicle of Dennis Cooper’s intertwined life and work, without circumscribing the possibilities that remain for readers to construct a Dennis of their own. Hester interprets Cooper’s creations within their historical, relational, and political contexts, and keeps alive the interpersonal spark that makes Cooper such an inspiration for rebels and artists everywhere.”—Wayne Koestenbaum, author, Camp Marmalade

Kaplan Harris

“The time has certainly come for a large-scale study of Dennis Cooper, and Wrong is a major achievement that satisfies in every respect. Hester’s ferocious sleuthing conveys us to whole new areas of understanding about Cooper, and makes the definitive case for Cooper as both modern day Rimbaud and Sade.”—Kaplan Harris, coeditor, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley