Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing

Winner, 2023 CCCC Exemplar Award

Writing and Desire is a sustained, multimovement exploration of how writers, particularly queer writers, think and feel through desire as central to their writing practice. In a time of political, social, global, and ecological unrest, how might we understand desire--the desire for things to be different, the desire for a better world--as a crucial dimension of contemporary human experience? What might such a recentering of desire offer us, personally and politically? And how is writing itself, as one of the primary ways through which we express and explore ourselves, central to the expression and exploration of desire? Drawing on recent theoretical work in queer theory and the new materialism, Jonathan Alexander studies a range of queer and trans writers and artists who center desire in their practice and argues that conceptualizing writing as desire allows us to reexperience both writing and our world as saturated with our dreams and wishes for change. In a book both elegant and unsettling, and by turns personal, analytic, and experimental, Alexander challenges us--and himself--to think about desire and writing as the deepest manifestation of our hopes for the future.

Author: Jonathan Alexander
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 06/06/2023
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.20lbs
Size: 8.10h x 8.30w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9780822947776
ISBN10: 0822947773
BISAC Categories:
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Writing | General

About the Author
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of twenty-two books.