Please join us for a lecture by Jane Gallop:  Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion

8 February 2012,   2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

In this lecture Jane Gallop returns to one of her theoretical touchstones, The Pleasure of the Text, in order to frame Roland Barthes as a queer theorist avant la lettre. In 1973 Barthes outlines and advocates an anti-normative, anti-institutional erotics that celebrates the reader’s perversity. Gallop connects her reading of Barthes’ celebration of perversity, now over 30 years old, to contemporary discussions of queer temporality. While it is well known that Barthes understands readerly pleasure according to the model of sexual perversion, Gallop shows how Barthes surprisingly advocates a kind of sexual dysfunction.  While both perversion and dysfunction are part of the pathologization of difference in sexuality, it seems easier and less radical to celebrate perversion – which has a transgressive cultural and theoretical history – than to expand the affirmation of sexual otherness beyond perversion to dysfunction. Gallop explores these linkages between texts, bodies, failure, and bliss, with her characteristic attentiveness to close reading and intellectual bravado.

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women’s Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976).  She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles. While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts.  She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 35 years. Her most recent book is The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, published by Duke University Press in 2011.

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