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This essay performs a haptic reading of “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Following Ishmael’s way of “squeezing cases” and touching upon epistemological issues, it explores how Melville’s fiction dramatizes the affective, epistemological, and literary capabilities of touch. Discussing previous work on hapticality in Melville and building upon recent developments regarding the role of the senses in close reading, it starts by delineating the synesthetic tendencies of Melville’s fiction, in which seeing and touching, the impalpable and the palpable, are intermingled in the quest of a “visible truth.” It then examines how, in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the visual becomes palpable. Indeed, through a singular, underlying focus on textures, Ishmael’s discourse on whiteness performs a simultaneous, equally valid though contradictory alternative to what it says, and a haptic reading of it enables us to squeeze a sense of touch out of this intensely visual chapter. It also highlights the problematic racial implications of a category that erases differences and promotes a semblance of pure, abstract whiteness. Reading the chapter’s famous final paragraph as a painting enables us to recover the haptic phenomenological quality of colors through their textures, which unsettles traditional readings that equate whiteness with terrifying emptiness. A true epistemology of touch in Melville is therefore to be found in the reconfiguration of seeing as touching—what I call a process of becoming-synesthetic, which is revelatory of what literature can feel like—rather than in a mere reversal of the hierarchy between the two senses. Ultimately, this essay highlights the importance of synesthesia in the singular dynamics of literary discourse and its impact on our ways of reading.

This article reflects on how street art helps to “queer” the city of Philadelphia. America’s sixth largest city has come to be known as the “City of Murals” following the initiative started by Mural Arts Philadelphia’s (MAP) Executive Director Jane Golden in 1987. It has also in recent years been re-branded as a queer city. Firstly, I consider how street art represents queer communities, drawing on human geographer Felix Driver’s paradigm of image-centred or “imaginative geography.” Based on a non-representational model of geography, I also reflect on how street art allows the queer community to constitute spaces for LGBTQIA+ people of colour. Philadelphia’s street art enables individual self-determination, as well as congregation, contestation, and conversation among queer people of colour, and between the queer and wider communities, in Philadelphia today. Following recent work on digital geographies of sexuality, a number of examples considered in this article focus on the power of digital media to re-purpose MAP’s murals and Philadelphia’s street art for queer purposes.

This article sets out to examine the ways in which Don DeLillo uses ekphrasis in his later novels to explore new modes of perceiving reality through screens; these perceptual modes allow readers to discover the effects produced by the hybridization of reality, and to experience how media and technological devices distort both the perception of time and experiential reality. The quality of perceptual experiences lies at the core of the writer’s aesthetics, which builds on the ability of language to convey the subjective perception of the characters, as well as the sensations and emotions that shape their mental lives and actively involve their sensing bodies, in an attempt to elicit readers’ empathic responses and their ethical engagement with the narrative contents. Unlike his novels published before 2000, where the presence of images leads to a phenomenon of hyperreality, DeLillo’s later fiction develops a rhetoric of seeing which gives rise to a reading experience that has the power to reveal the present to the readers. Readerly involvement resides, I argue, in the reader-cum-viewer position and the tension that develops from the interplay between the characters’ embodied act of seeing and the readers’ responses in relation to the narrative framing of the scene; the reading experience thus acquires emotional relevance. Reading, just as viewing, becomes a lived, embodied experience that allows readers to experience the characters’ subjective perception of time, and decide whether they feel with the characters or choose to block out empathic responses.

The founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, had strong opinions about William Faulkner’s novels, to say the least. Sanctuary, especially, ignited his ire. In a scathing essay entitled “The School of Cruelty,” published in March 1931, Canby deplored what he perceived as the terrible situation of Southern writers, declaring Faulkner the figurehead of a so-called “American sadism.” “So it will be with this new sadism,” Canby wrote, “the novel cruelty by which the American scene with all its infinite shadings is made into something gross, sordid, or, as here, depraved with an ironic depravity in which the trivial by a kind of perversion becomes more horrible than professional evil.” Faulkner is expectedly not the only example of literature deemed “disgusting:” according to Chuck Palahniuk himself, seventy-three people have fainted during public readings of this short story “Guts.” Despite the writer’s obvious delight in describing in vivid detail the fainting spells he witnessed, this specific number is difficult to corroborate. However, numerous readers’ reviews on the popular website Goodreads.com indicate that Palahniuk’s assertions were not unfounded. One reviewer wrote: “I need to talk to someone about this book. I’m trying to digest it. I don’t know if it’s vile trash or provocative writing. It made me feel very strong emotions, which is usually a hallmark of good writing in my opinion, but the emotions were so, so unpleasant […]. I don’t know if my heart or stomach can handle the rest of the book. Is it worth it?” A good question indeed. How can a text, which relies on words on a page and not images, provoke such violent reactions? And finally, can a text be “digested”? Can there be any “pleasure of the text,” to use Roland Barthes’ expression, in the description of something “so, so unpleasant”? This paper is interested in the literary and aesthetic mechanisms enabling a profoundly somatic reading of fiction, especially in the violent experience of disgust, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I will try to determine the aesthetic and political role disgust plays in these works, in order to prove that the physical unpleasantness caused by the experience of disgust forces readers to confront their societal conditioning by bringing them to the limits of readability.

Based on an analysis of the novel Infants of the Spring (1932), this article explores the circulation and metamorphoses of Black and queer cultural identities in the urban space of Harlem (New York) during the 1920s. In this roman à clef, Black American writer and editor Wallace Thurman revisited the experience of the Black bohemia. He did so focusing on the so-called “Niggeratti Manor,” a residence where some of the young Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance lived. At the time, New York was still organized along racially segregated lines and various factors were shaping the uptown neighborhood: the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North of the United States; the urban reforms that aimed to organize this migration; and the political, intellectual, and artistic production that accompanied the Black emancipation struggles. In addition, during this period, which was also that of Prohibition, white queer men and women patronized the neighborhood. On the one hand, Harlem was a fairly welcoming area for gay and lesbian people. On the other hand, it provided access to an entertainment world in which performance and camp were central. This article discusses how, using the metaphor of theater, and specifically the highly racially codified genre of the minstrel show, Infants of the Spring depicts male, Black, and queer identities in the modern urban landscape. Thurman’s novel interrogates the formation and circulation of these identities through the lens of the multiple relationships that Black artists had with white men, artists, and lovers, as well as with Black artists, intellectuals, and reformers.

This paper uses examples drawn from US cities (Midtown in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ybor City in Tampa, Florida) to develop a more generalizable framework within which to analyze the process of queering a neighborhood and identifying policy measures that might keep it queer. This kind of comparative approach enables a more careful reading of queer urban spaces based on the behaviors of LGBTQ people in and around those spaces. The strategic aim of these comparisons is to expand our understanding of queer spaces and to elaborate a more fluid model of queering cities. The paper uses a gravitational framework that identifies the centering (centripetal) and decentering (centrifugal) forces and the interplay between these forces. Each case provides different lessons for planners regarding the importance of either mitigating or exacerbating the centrifugal tendencies that so often threaten queer spaces. Because these forces are unique to each LGBTQ space, the analytic strategy provides for greater generalizability across different sizes of cities, across various cultural and ethnic areas, and a wider array of geographies.

Little Tulip (2014) is the third collaboration between US writer Jerome Charyn and French comic strip artist François Boucq. This graphic novel moves back and forth between the USSR of the 1940s and 1950s and New York City in the 1970s to tell the story of Paul, a US-born tattoo artist who spent his childhood in a Gulag colony in Siberia where, as Pavel, he learnt his craft. Drawing and tatooing are at the heart of the narrative, both Charyn and Boucq attempting to probe their powers: when Pavel/Paul becomes an artist in the Gulag, he learns to adorn captive bodies with insignia that reflect the strict hierarchy of the camp or with codified symbols that tell the stories of the criminals’ lives, but he also learns to penetrate those savage men’s personalities and thus to save his own skin by beautifully inking the skins of others. Beyond exposing the very concrete powers that enable the young tatoo artist to survive in Siberia by both respecting and transgressing the rules of the camp, and then to roam the violent streets of New York city, Little Tulip explores the laws of art that each drawing contains: rules that allow the artist to walk the thin line between art and magic, where the indelible ink of tatoo can paradoxically give birth to invisibility.

Cartoonists Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa, writing in a socially and culturally heteronormative context, give life to a fantasy: worlds that, instead of excluding dykes from public space, are entirely organized around lesbian characters. Both reflect the debates within lesbian feminist groups, the tensions between lesbian and straight feminists, and the strategies that can be deployed in the face of discrimination. They create utopian (Bechdel) and dystopian (DiMassa) universes that parallel and question contemporary US realities. DiMassa presents a caricatured, degraded version of US society, focusing on its relation to minorities, as seen through the eyes of a “homicidal lesbian terrorist” intent on reclaiming their right to exist in the world. Bechdel’s syndicated bi-monthly strip is a twenty-five-year running commentary on US politics viewed from a lesbian perspective, that also discusses such feminist and/or LGBTQ+ issues as gender relations, the sodomy laws, trans rights, marriage equality, etc., and that shows her characters evolving on a number of these issues, as many Americans have since the 1980s. For all their provocation and humor, these comics from the margins have remained eerily topical.

The French press was a crucial intermediary for the circulation of US literature in France during the 1940s. However, its role in this importing process has rarely been studied. Yet, the study of some forty journals (Combat, La Bataille, Action, Carrefour, Esprit...) confirms the construction of a “French taste” in American literature and suggests that the praise of American literary contributions was quickly criticized in periodicals with quite different editorial lines. Furthermore, it is in the press that some unknown mediators forged a critical discourse about a foreseeable influence of US texts on French writers: they were academics (Las Vergnas, Sigaux, Larnac), demanding aficionados (Beaumont, Blanzat, Fauchery, Hoog, Lalou, Morel), but also detractors of this importation (Henriot, Kanapa). The massive arrival of American literature in France did not create an ephemeral fever in the media. On the contrary, the French press scrutinized this American literary “moment” and addressed some fundamental questions, such as the reality of the American literary input or the advent of a literary massification caused by American influence.

Walter Farley’s stallion, Black, is certainly remembered as one of the most famous and beloved animals in Hachette’s Bibliothèque verte. The numerous titles in the “Black Stallion” series were reedited several times, and ultimately achieved high sales. The story of the introduction of the series in France in the aftermath of World War II, and its inclusion in this now-classic library of children’s texts, is largely unknown. Behind the scenes of the transatlantic negotiations, a narrative of complex, arduous discussions between author, series editor and agents unfolds, revealing the roles played by mediators usually forgotten by literary history. Based on archival evidence, this article develops a book history perspective to shed some light on these long negotiations that took place between 1941 and 1964.

Although the Harlem Renaissance considerably influenced the poets of the “negritude” movement, its editorial and academic reception among French writers and readers has been quite confidential. Yet between the translation of several poems in the 1920s and a growing number of studies produced by French researchers since 2000, the poetry of Langston Hughes in particular has been channeled towards French readers, in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly through the journal Présence Africaine and, more surprisingly, the publishing house of Pierre Seghers. This article seeks to describe the promotion of Hughes’s work by Seghers between 1947 and 1966. It examines the choices and circumstances leading to the publication of several of Hughes’s works: his first autobiography, a volume of poetry (translated by François Dodat in 1955), a book in the series “Poètes d’aujourd’hui” and two anthologies in 1962 and 1966. It also relies on the correspondence between Hughes and Seghers from 1955 to 1966 (which is kept in the Beinecke Library at Yale University). The study of this corpus of texts leads me to the following hypothesis: Langston Hughes’s reception in France was determined by the interventions of Seghers, who, rather than emphasize his status as one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance or as a political author, highlighted his commitment to the democratic diffusion of his poetry. In Seghers’s view, his biography and his work can be seen as a model poetic gesture: both active and likely to solicit action.

The collaboration between Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and the Dijon printer Maurice Darantière that resulted in the first printing of Ulysses in 1922 was commemorated in a 1988 study by the modernist scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté: Maurice Darantière, les années vingt: bibliographie d’imprimeur. The bibliography appended to the investigation of Darantière's publishing history (1900-1928) reveals a remarkable number of volumes of English-language poetry, essays and fiction during this period. Along with French translations of a range of English-language short stories (by Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Allan Poe), Darantière’s catalogue boasts over a dozen English-language volumes, including those by some of the key figures of anglophone literary modernism (Bryher, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D.). Darantière’s willingness to print books in a language other than French is a tribute not only to the audaciousness of his enterprise but to the network of influence established among Anglo-American writers, publishers and booksellers in France in the first decades of the twentieth century. What can a new examination of the Darantière collection (Bibliothèque municipale, Dijon) bring to light about the mediation of avant-garde Anglo-American writing in France and what Lawrence Rainey has called the “commodification” (44) of modernist print culture? The contribution of Darantière in the dissemination of Anglo-American literary experiment will be measured alongside the expanding role of the printer, from craftsman to vector of the new expatriate writing.