[ecrea] Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility - new book

*Melodrama***

*An Aesthetics of Impossibility***

/Jonathan Goldberg/

//

     "Jonathan Goldberg is always interesting and always incisive. In 
this wide-ranging and powerfully revisionist study he tracks the 
melodramatic form across music, film, fiction, and television, from 
Fidelio to The Wire. His suggestive readings show how melodrama’s 
rhetoric of moral peril generates queer energy and brings about 'an 
aesthetics of the impossible situation.'"–Michael Warner/, author of 
Publics and Counterpublics /

     "/Melodrama/ is a major work that offers a superbly original way 
of thinking queerness, impossibility, and melodrama together. Exploring 
the insistence of nonidentity in the melodramatic mode, Jonathan 
Goldberg reads texts by Beethoven, Sirk, Fassbinder, Haynes, Hitchcock, 
Highsmith, Cather, and Davies to show how melodrama, by confronting 
limitation, reveals that nothing is only what it seems: other readings 
are always available; other potentialities always inhere. Beautifully 
elaborated, theoretically pointed, and intellectually provocative, 
/Melodrama/ gives thought in constant motion a chance to take center 
stage."– Lee Edelman, author of /No Future: Queer Theory and the Death 
Drive/

//

     Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg 
explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics 
of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the 
"impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual 
relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and 
prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and 
Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on 
melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he 
explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by 
Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, 
including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound 
provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of 
the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction 
of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its 
indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a 
powerful tool for creating new potentials.

*Jonathan Goldberg* is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of 
English at Emory University and the author of several books, most 
recently /Strangers on a Train: A Queer Film Classic/. He is also the 
author of /Willa Cather and Others/ and editor of /Queering the 
Renaissance/, both also published by Duke University Press.

Duke University Press

Theory Q

August 2016 224pp  9780822361916 PB £19.99now only £15.99* when you 
quote *CSL816MELO* when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/melodrama



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