Ziegler Lecture
“From Rimbaud to Stefan George: Queer Strategies in Modernist Poetry”
Dr. Max Kramer
Assistant Professor of French
Baruch College, CUNY and University of Saskatchewan
This talk will trace the representation of queer desire and identity in the Modernist age through the example of Arthur Rimbaud and Stefan George. Both developed unique strategies to convey a pathologized sexual reality that could not be expressed in the normative language of the period. The lecture will look at how the 19th- and early 20th-century debates that took place in forensic medicine translated into poetry, a literary genre often considered to be antithetical to materialistic science. The aim of the research is to show how much poetry was informed by sexology but also was at odds with many of the claims of the homosexual rights movement.
Dr. Max Kramer is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Saskatchewan and at Baruch College, CUNY. He holds a joint Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and the Sorbonne (Paris IV). He is a former Fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and former Pensionnaire Étranger of the École Normale Supérieure at Paris. His research focuses on queer representations in 19th- and early 20th-century European poetry, sexuality in postcolonial North African and Middle Eastern literature and society, and on the question of human rights vs. cultural rights. At present he is finishing the revisions on his book “Poésie et inversion: la métaphore queer dans la poésie moderne,” to be published by L’Harmattan. He has published on Rimbaud, Stefan George, modern poetry, queer sexuality in the Muslim world, the novel of adultery, and on translation.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Faculty of Arts HSS Visiting Speaker Program, the CENES Ziegler Fund, the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, and the program in Critical Studies in Sexuality, and is offered in collaboration with St. John’s College.
