The Fugitive Dead: Queer Temporality and the Project of Revisioning in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

<p>Following from such theorists as Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman and Heather Love, this thesis seeks to address current scholarship on queerness and temporality that conceptualizes queer subjects as complicating traditional notions of linear time, reproduction, and progress. Mobilizing theories of temporal disruption and disorientation, including backwardness and the queer moment, this thesis explores the association between such disruptions and a persistent impulse to reckon with and reconstruct what I refer to as “the fugitive dead,” understood here both as past events and as the ghostly figures of the dead and effaced. Such disruptions can, this project posits, foster queerly generative affinities between seemingly separate categories (e.g. between the present and the past or between the living and the dead), thereby providing alternatives and challenges to normative temporal trajectories.</p> <p>My analysis considers literary representations of such temporal disruptions, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, Michael Cunningham’s <em>The Hours</em>, and Alison Bechdel’s <em>Fun Home</em> to explore their treatments of temporal linearity, queer moments, affinity and connection, as well as haunting and spectrality. Furthermore, this thesis also addresses the capacity of literary texts to <em>enact </em>temporal disruption in the form of the revisioning project, which can be figured as the literary attempt to encounter the fugitive dead. Ultimately, this thesis explores the literary and intertextual dimensions of this complex approach to queer temporality, advocating for the generative possibilities of an attentiveness to the continued presence of the past and an engagement with the figures of the lost and disappeared.</p>