In this brief and powerful book, Diana Fuss takes on the debate of pure essence versus social construct, engaging with the work of Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston Baker, and with the politics of gay identity.

The Sense of an Interior is a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. The book looks at four famous figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust, and examines the relationship between their work and the spaces where they wrote.

"The Sense of an Interior" is a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. In four beautiful essay-chapters Diana Fuss examines four exemplary figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust. Women and men, gay and straight, European and American, bound together by their gifts as writers, by the special bond between each of them and the space within which they wrote.
But in Diana Fuss's hands we discover something more: while Helen Keller is certainly the most remarkable in her triumph over profound disabilities, each of the other three sustained a disability of their own. Dickinson, who confined herself to the house in Amherst, suffered from periodic bouts of blindness. Freud's famous examining room in Vienna was arranged to compensate for his deafness in one ear. Helen Keller's home in Easton, Connecticut was a world she could master until, with age, even her sense of touch finally failed her. Neurotic Proust, obsessed with smell, hated the odor of cooking and arranged his apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann to keep him as far as possible from the kitchen.
Illustrated with almost sixty images, many rare, and some never before published, this richly observed book weaves together new understandings of domestic space, creativity, and disability.

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. "Human, All Too Human" considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism?
Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. "Human, All Too Human" examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by "things" and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them.
The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires.
Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis

The notion of identification, especially in the discourse of feminist theory, has come sharply and dramatically into focus with the recent interest in such topics as queer performativity, cross-dressing, and racial passing. "Identification Papers" is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics.
"Identification Papers" situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identificationin Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one.
"Identification Papers" closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political.
Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- "Identification Papers" will be a necessary starting point in anyfuture theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.

Lesbians and gays have gone from "coming out," to "acting up," to "outing," meanwhile radically redefining society's views on sexuality and gender. The essays in Inside/Out employ a variety of approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and discourse theory) to investigate representations of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music, and photography. Engaging the figures of divas, dykes, vampires and queens, the contributors address issues such as AIDS, pornography, pedagogy, authorship, and activism. Inside/Out shifts the focus from sex to sexual orientation, provoking a reconsideration of the concepts of the sexual and the political.

The first anthology to offer full-length state-of-the-art lesbian and gay theory, investigating representations of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music and photography.

Using a feminist, poststructuralist perspective, Diana Fuss addresses the 'nature v. culture' debate, asking whether femininity, race, or homosexuality have 'essential natures'. She examines critically both positions in the debate.

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. "Human, All Too Human" considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism?
Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. "Human, All Too Human" examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by "things" and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them.
The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires.
Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, HarrietRitvo, David Willis

This is the first comprehensive collection of hands-on, active learning exercises for the college literature classroom, offering ideas and inspiration for new and veteran teachers alike. These 101 surefire lesson plans present creative and interactive activities to get all your students talking and learning, from the first class to final review. Whether you are teaching majors or nonmajors, genres or periods, canonical or noncanonical literature, medieval verse or the graphic novel, this volume provides practical and flexible exercises for creating memorable learning experiences. Help students learn more and retain that knowledge longer by teaching them how to question, debate, annotate, imitate, write, draw, map, stage, or perform. These user-friendly exercises feature clear and concise step-by-step instructions, and each exercise is followed by helpful teaching tips and descriptions of the exercise in action. All encourage collaborative learning and many are adaptable to different class sizes or course levels. A collection of successful approaches for teaching fiction, poetry, and drama and their historical, cultural, and literary contexts, this indispensable book showcases the tried and true alongside the fresh and innovative. *101 creative classroom exercises for teaching literature* Exercises contributed by experienced teachers at a wide range of colleges and universities* Step-by-step instructions and teaching tips for each exercise* Extensive introduction on the benefits of bringing active learning to the literature classroom* Cross-references for finding further exercises and to aid course planning* Index of literary authors, works, and related topics

This is the first comprehensive collection of hands-on, active learning exercises for the college literature classroom, offering ideas and inspiration for new and veteran teachers alike. These 101 surefire lesson plans present creative and interactive activities to get all your students talking and learning, from the first class to final review. Whether you are teaching majors or nonmajors, genres or periods, canonical or noncanonical literature, medieval verse or the graphic novel, this volume provides practical and flexible exercises for creating memorable learning experiences. Help students learn more and retain that knowledge longer by teaching them how to question, debate, annotate, imitate, write, draw, map, stage, or perform. These user-friendly exercises feature clear and concise step-by-step instructions, and each exercise is followed by helpful teaching tips and descriptions of the exercise in action. All encourage collaborative learning and many are adaptable to different class sizes or course levels. A collection of successful approaches for teaching fiction, poetry, and drama and their historical, cultural, and literary contexts, this indispensable book showcases the tried and true alongside the fresh and innovative. *101 creative classroom exercises for teaching literature* Exercises contributed by experienced teachers at a wide range of colleges and universities* Step-by-step instructions and teaching tips for each exercise* Extensive introduction on the benefits of bringing active learning to the literature classroom* Cross-references for finding further exercises and to aid course planning* Index of literary authors, works, and related topics

In "Dying Modern," one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit.

Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry's fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing.

In "Dying Modern," one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit.

Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry's fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing.