Michael D. Snediker, "Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
In this episode, I interview Michael Snediker, professor of English at the University of Houston, about his book,\xa0Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment, recently published by University of Minnesota Press. At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain\u2019s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable.\nSuffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience,\xa0Contingent Figure\xa0resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes\xa0Contingent Figure\xa0an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading\u2019s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.\nBritt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on\xa0Twitter\xa0or send him an\xa0email.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies