Part 1 - The Anamorphic

Summary

Part 1: Eliza Haywood’s oriental romance Eovaai reworks the trope of being “carried away” as an undisciplined way of inhabiting a world organized around reproducing patriarchal power and masculine dignity. Haywood evokes the classical fascinum, or winged penis, to confront readers with a spectacle of the materiality of heteropatriarchal world-making. Tracing Haywood’s fascinum back to earlier iterations from the medieval and early modern periods, as well as forward to psychoanalytic and phenomenological treatments, this book considers the possibilities of fascination as a paracritical mode of attention. The anamorphic describes a mode of representation that resists resolution into something straightforwardly comprehensible, thereby withholding from the subject who views it the steadying ground of epistemological certainty. Eovaai presents an irreverent celebration of bodies that choose flight over fixity, vulnerability over legibility, and transformative potential over ideological coherence. As such, it ushers readers into unexpected encounters with our own epistemological capacities as dynamically embodied creatures.