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Abstract
My dissertation examines concepts of life, death, and survival in texts from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries, and their relationship to the same ideas in the present day. Contrary to conventional understandings of life and death as bounded by the body, these texts call for a more expansive understanding of what constitutes life and how to survive death, locating life not only in the human body, but also in literary texts, patterns and routines, religious and affective communities, and physical places. This newly enlarged category of life makes room for a broad understanding of the future and how it is accessed and enacted. As the recent critical conversation on queer futurity has demonstrated, popular understandings of the future are commonly grounded in the idea of the child as the privileged, or even the only, link to the future; this view forecloses the future for those who do not take part in human procreation. The medieval and early modern texts that form the basis of my study—drawn from religious literature, romance, drama, and lyric poetry—call for a complex re-reading of the relationship among life, death, and the future, and demonstrate that the future takes many forms, not all of which are accessed through human procreation and biological continuance.
Taking as its departure point what Carla Freccero has recently referred to as “decades of mortality’s untimely reign in LGBTQ studies” (PMLA 128.3, 781), my project challenges the specter of mortality that haunts queer studies, as Freccero claims, through a wide-ranging inquiry that engages queer theory, literary criticism, and contemporary political issues. Theoretical work from Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Doyle, among others, provides a foundation for understanding what we talk about when we talk about life. Modes of reproduction other than human procreation, including sacred, textual, and dynastic reproduction, as well as new methods of locating and understanding life, form a constellation of paths to the future. This constellation leads to an expanded understanding of the future and who has access to it: new ideas of what constitutes life offer the promise of a future that is borne out not necessarily through children, but also through texts, dynasties, religious communities, and places. In the context of current debates in the United States on issues such as family values and reproductive rights, a study of what constitutes life, how we access the future outside of human procreation, and the value of different paths to the future productively challenges the mores surrounding the value of life and human procreation in the twenty-first century.
