Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self
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Raffaele Cutolo is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Verona. Among his publications, the monograph
Into the Woods of Wicked Wonderland (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014) and essays on queer theory, contemporary literature and culture, Renaissance literature.
Abstract
This essay examines how Walter Pater’s work “Sebastian van Storck” (Imaginary Portraits) could provide for a new re-reading of Pater’s queerness from a de-constructivist viewpoint which investigates the borders of identity from an anti-social perspective. As a juxtaposition to 1970s theory of sexuality, the anti-social take involves a withdrawal of the homosexual from society, and a subsequent tendency to create a twofold separation: one from without, and one -more subtle- from within. The former entails a rupture between the homosexual Self and the heteronormative Other, the latter is an ontological division between the queer I and its internal culturally heteronormalised counterpart, to be viewed as yet another attempt of the fin-de-siècle complex Self to reach a compromise in a liminal time that could no longer be considered fully Victorian.
About the author
Raffaele Cutolo is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Verona. Among his publications, the monograph Into the Woods of Wicked Wonderland (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014) and essays on queer theory, contemporary literature and culture, Renaissance literature.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Law and Borders: Territory, Space and Time between Diversity and Protection
- The Law and the Line: The Literary Mirroring of a Paradigm
- Half of a Yellow Sun or the Quest for (and Repression of) New Boundaries in Post-Colonial Nigeria: An International Law Analysis
- Freedom’s Frontiers: The Travails of LGBT Travelers
- Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self
- Donʼt Ask Us for Lex. Body Exhibition and Forms of Exclusion
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Translation, Copyright & Authority
- Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons
- Tubal, Shylock, and the Myth of Venice
- Law Meets Literature: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide Studies
- Literature, Art and the Democracy to Come: A Legal Approach to The Danish Girl
- Book Reviews
- Dale Barleben: Staging the Trials of Modernism. Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness
- Lucky Belder Helle Porsdam: Negotiating Cultural Rights. Issues at Stake, Challenges and Recommendations
