Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan

by Richard Halpern

Overview

Starting with St. Paul's argument that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality to punish their excessive love of statues, Richard Halpern uncovers a tradition in which aesthetic experience gives birth to the sexual—and thus reverses the Freudian thesis that erotic desire is sublimated into art. Rather, Halpern argues, sodomy was implicated with aesthetic categories from the very start, as he traces a connection between sodomy and the unrepresentable that runs from Shakespeare's Sonnets to Oscar Wilde's novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Freud's famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812236613
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	05/29/2002
Series:	New Cultural Studies Series
Pages:	134
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Richard Halpern is the author of Shakespeare Among the Moderns. He is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Shakespeare's Perfume
Chapter 2. Theory to Die For: Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W.H.
Chapter 3. Freud's Egyptian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
Chapter 4. Lacan's Anal Thing: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"A witty, provocative, and timely book . . . that takes much current discussion of gender, aesthetics, and sexuality one step further."

Sixteenth Century Journal

"This is a criticism of nearly Nietzschean wit. Halpern goes about his intellectual business with a combination of deep levity and sustaining seriousness."

Washington University Joseph Loewenstein

"This unique book will change and deepen the sense of what sexual desire has meant and means in the culture that we inhabit, and that inhabits us in turn."

Princeton University Jeff Nunokawa

"Halpern's intriguing book traces an enigmatic core of ideas in some of the most beguiling works of Western theory, art, and literature. Highly recommended."—Choice

"A witty, provocative, and timely book . . . that takes much current discussion of gender, aesthetics, and sexuality one step further."—Sixteenth Century Journal

"This unique book will change and deepen the sense of what sexual desire has meant and means in the culture that we inhabit, and that inhabits us in turn."—Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University

"This is a criticism of nearly Nietzschean wit. Halpern goes about his intellectual business with a combination of deep levity and sustaining seriousness."—Joseph Loewenstein, Washington University

From the Publisher