At the close of Proust’s A La recherche, Marcel reflects on his late discovery that there is within him a ‘vast dimension’ of lost time, composed of moments that ‘still adhered to me and that I could still find again, merely by descending to a greater depth within myself’. The vehicle through which he is to achieve that descent, he thinks to himself, is the novel itself, the novel he is now to write.

A la recherche is, for this reason, a novel which demands to be reread, a novel which reveals the structural necessity of rereading that inhabits all acts of being in time. This essay responds to this demand, and this necessity, by reading Proust’s novel as an exercise in rereading. The epiphanic close to the novel rests on the conviction that there will come a form of writing, and a form of reading, that might absorb lost time into itself, and in so doing stage a recovery of a spent past, and of a spent life. But in calling in this way for its own repetition, the novel can only live, again, through the loss that it seeks to overcome. This inescapable play between recovery and loss, though, does not constitute a failure of the hope that the novel seems, on each reading, to rediscover. Rather, in inserting a logic of rereading into its own expressive mechanism, the novel becomes a scale for weighing those elements of time that are recoverable against those that are not. It allows us to see the novel as a differential machine, that can find the junction, in the contemporary moment of reading, between that which can be saved and that which cannot – the junction that is the horizon, in our own time, of literary, political and personal possibility.

Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

Contra assumptions regarding Bishop’s privileging of perspicacity as interlinked subject and method, this essay reflects on the persistence within her poems of a haptic incessancy pursued as though for the pleasure of its own sake. The affinity between Bishop’s formulation of peninsulas taking up the water that surrounds them “like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods” and the appearance in a late essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of an identical gesture, what Sedgwick invokes as the weaver’s handshake, opens onto a consideration in both writers of an exacting inexactness resistant, for Sedgwick, to paranoid reading’s opposite tendency toward a clarity too often – in both queer theory and queer readings of Bishop’s work – treated as self-evident. Returning to Bishop’s under-examined engagement with Poe illuminates her own frequent challenging of epistemology’s queer promise, inviting our appreciation for a poetic wavering capable of withstanding even our best-intentioned corrections.

Shakespeare’s works continually interrogate shame’s capacity both to repress the individual by reinforcing conservative social norms and to engender an enriched understanding of the self and the world. This chapter engages with critical interventions on shame by Leo Bersani, Gail Kern Paster, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Dan Zahavi to examine its function in a wide range of Shakespearean texts, focusing in particular on Coriolanus (1608) and the anonymously-published A Lover’s Complaint (1609). For Coriolanus, shame sparks a moment of insight in which he accepts an externalised version of himself; it provides a phenomenological experience that runs counter to his usual sense of self and to broader Roman values. In contrast, the shame of the abandoned woman in A Lover's Complaint highlights the gap between early modern ethical discourses and her own sexual and emotional experiences. In both works, however, it is the movement outside of the self that follows shame which offers the most radical and illuminating reorientation of subjectivity; this shift in perspective – inspired by love, desire and sympathy – enables characters to experience an othering of the self that is expansive rather than narcissistic.