This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

The chapter works, step by step, through the problem of reading as Joyce constructs it, using Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to explicate the structure of the problem and where its solutions lead. In the literature, Kleinian and Lacanian theory are almost never brought into contact; this chapter offers a new comparison of the theories, both for readers of each theory and for readers of Joyce. In addition, the chapter furthers, and intensifies, the analysis of ‘The Dead’ as an invitation to paranoid reading, and it traces the ways Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ invites the reader into a position of paranoid complicity.

Most previous discussions of Ezra Pound, gender and sexuality have focused on Pound’s poetic depictions of women and his relationships with women artists, patrons and muses. The fascinating biographical stories include such figures as the poet H. D., perhaps Pound’s first love; the pianist and patron Margaret Cravens, who took her life after playing a song Pound and Walter Rummel wrote for her; Pound’s wife, Dorothy (Shakespear) Pound; and his long-time mistress, Olga Rudge, a concert violinist. When critics focus on sexuality and Pound, the result tends to be ‘paranoid’ rather than ‘reparative’ readings, to use Eve Sedgwick’s famous formulation.