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Thinkiest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

All my feeling for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick comes from her writing. I wasn't a friend. I never met her or even heard her give a public lecture or present a paper. The closest we came was being bound together, one after the other, in the same edited anthology, my essay on sequence and precedence in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and its various adaptations following an extract from her A Dialogue on Love. If Sedgwick's essay and mine can be said to speak to each other, to strike a conversational pose, as though the breadth of a page might be mistaken for the more sociable span of a bar or table, it is only to point up the spuriousness of this effect. For whatever weight of significance the closing section of Sedgwick's essay might seem to license my finding in this happenstance—“I don't resist … secretly fingering this enigmatic pebble. I can't quite figure out what makes its meaning for me” (“Dialogue” 351)—is made implausible with the page's turn by the brutalist facade of my first sentence: “Sequence is its own alibi” (352).

Information

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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