The city of collective memory

GLQ

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 195-243

  Chisholm, Dianne ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 73949102826     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-7-2-195     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 76.
2. "Were the relationship between streets, homes, and groups inhabiting them wholly accidental and of short duration, then men might tear down their homes, district, and city, only to rebuild another on the same site according to a different set of plans. But even if stones are movable, relationships established between stones and men are not so easily altered. When a group has lived a long time in a place adapted to its habits, its thoughts as well as its movements are in turn ordered by the succession of images from these external objects. Now suppose these homes and streets are demolished or their appearance and layout are altered. The stones and other materials will not object, but the groups will. This resistance, if not in the stones themselves, at least arises out of their long-standing relationships with these groups.⋯
3. The force of local tradition comes forth from this physical object, which serves as its image" (ibid., 33-34).
4. "Any inhabitant for whom the old walls, rundown homes, and obscure passageways create a little universe, who has many remembrances fastened to these images now obliterated forever, feels a whole part of himself dying with these things and regrets that they could not last at least for his lifetime. Such individual sorrow and malaise is without effect, for it does not affect the collectivity.⋯ It [the collectivity] resists with all the force of its traditions, which have effect.⋯
5. It endeavors to hold firm or reshape itself in a district or on a street that is no longer ready-made for it but was once its own" (ibid., 134).
6. See Queers in Space: Communities, Public Spaces, Sites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996);
7. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1995);
8. Queer Sites: Gay Urban History Since 1600, ed. David Higgs (London: Routledge, 1999);
9. Kath Weston, "Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration," GLQ 2 (1995): 253-77.
10. This is not to say that gay men lack the capital to invest in urban restoration. See M. Lauria and L. Knopp, "Toward an Analysis of the Role of Gay Communities in the Urban Renaissance," Urban Geography 6 (1985): 152-69. But what image of the city do they seek to restore, and how does it figure collective memory?
11. Adapting Halbwachs's term and concept, M. Christine Boyer coins the phrase for the title of her book The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). I borrow Boyer's title in turn but without reference to her architectural analysis of urban planning and current challenges.
12. Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America since World War II (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1997).
13. Samuel Delany, Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction in the East Village, 1960-1965 (New York: Richard Kasak, 1993).
14. See Dianne Chisholm, "'Love at Last Sight,' or, Walter Benjamin's Dialectics of Seeing in the Wake of the Gay Bathhouse," Textual Practice 13 (1999): 243-72.
15. Halbwachs argues that history begins where collective memory ends and is therefore to be regarded with suspicion as an artificial and distorted reconstruction to which too much legitimacy is ascribed (Collective Memory, 57-59).
16. Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle" (1932), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 612-13;
17. hereafter cited in text and notes as "BC."
18. "The Berlin texts ['A Berlin Chronicle' and 'A Berlin Childhood around 1900' (1932)] were theoretical and methodological experiments for the 'Arcades Project,' models of historical analysis and writing which sought to explore the relationships between metropolitan environment, individual memory and collective history. How does the city transform memory? How does memory give form to the urban complex? Could the narration of an individual past critically illuminate the history of an epoch? These complex questions underpin Benjamin's Berlin writings. His 'autobiographical' fragments are thus exercises in critical historiography rather than wistful nostalgia" (Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City [London: Polity Press, 1996], 60).
19. In his foreword Benjamin wrote, " 'In this endeavour those biographical features, which appear more readily in the continuity than in the depths of experience, retreat. With them go the physiognomies-those of my family and of my friends. Instead, I have sought to capture the images which the experience of the big city left in a child of the middle class'" (cited in ibid., 58).
20. "His purpose is not to describe the urban complex through the eyes of a child, but to dereify it through his or her special, incisive, yet 'mistaken' knowledge.⋯
21. His childhood recollections seek to dereify and redeem the objects and spaces of the city that have become frozen and forgotten in childhood" (ibid., 65).
22. "Noisy, matter-of-fact Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business, nevertheless has more-not less-than some other cities of those places and moments when it bears witness to the dead, shows itself full of dead;
23. and the obscure awareness of these moments, these places, perhaps more than anything else, confers on childhood memories a quality that makes them at once evanescent and as alluringly tormenting as half-forgotten dreams" ("BC," 613).
24. Benjamin's friend, the young poet Fritz Heinle, and Heinle's fiancée, Rika Seligson, killed themselves in response to the outbreak of World War I. Their deaths had a profound impact on Benjamin.
25. "Benjamin's reflections on the city of his childhood are underlain by the figure of Heinle, who becomes a metaphor for Benjamin's own youthful dreams of cultural renaissance, for the optimism and nal̈veté of a generation that was to exterminate itself on the battlefields of France and Belgium" (Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 57).
26. "We were now walking on flagstones, which were slippery with fish water or swill and where you could easily lose your footing on carrots or lettuce leaves. Behind wire partitions, each bearing a number, were ensconced the ponderous ladies, priestesses of Venal Ceres, purveyors of all the fruits of the field and tree and of all edible birds, fishes, and mammals, procuresses, untouchable wool-clad colossi exchanging vibrant signs from booth to booth with a flash of their large mother-of-pearl buttons or a slap on their booming black aprons or their money-filled pouches. Didn't the earth bubble and seethe below the hems of their skirts, and wasn't this truly fertile ground?" ("BC," 613).
27. Benjamin acknowledges the limit of his urban imaginary, recalling how his childhood "was confined to this affluent neighborhood without knowledge of any other. The poor? For rich children of his generation, they lived at the back of beyond." In the persona of the adult he is now, he testifies that "I never slept on the street in Berlin. I saw sunset and dawn, but between the two I found myself a shelter. Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me. I always found quarters, even though sometimes tardy and also unknown ones that I did not revisit and where I was not alone. If I paused thus late in a doorway, my legs had become entangled in the ribbons of the streets, and it was not the cleanest of hands that freed me" ("BC," 600, 612).
28. "To make my way independently to the synagogue was out of the question, since I had no idea where it was. This bewilderment, forgetfulness, and embarrassment were doubtless chiefly due to my dislike of the impending service, in its familial no less than its divine aspect. While I was wandering thus, I was suddenly and simultaneously over come ⋯ by ⋯ an immense pleasure that filled me with blasphemous indifference toward the service, but exalted the street in which I stood, as if it had already intimated to me the services of procurement it was later to render to my awakened drive" ("BC," 630).
29. From Ibiza he first moved to Nice, "where he wrote his will and contemplated suicide. The crisis passed, however, and he spent the rest of the summer in Italy. It was there he reworked the 'Chronicle'⋯ for publication as a book to be entitled 'A Berlin Childhood around 1900'" (Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 57).
30. "Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance-nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-this calls for quite a different schooling" ("BC," 598).
31. "The city, as it disclosed itself to me in the footsteps of a hermetic tradition ⋯ was a maze not only of paths but also of tunnels. I cannot think of the underworld of the Métro and the North-South line opening their hundreds of shafts all over the city, without recalling my endless flâneries" ("BC," 598).
32. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the porous state of mind he was able to attain in his flâneries around Naples by miming the "porosity" of the Neapolitian landscape;
33. see Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 414-21.
34. For further (Benjaminian) discussion of "spacing out" as a technique of cultural adaptation, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 33-43.
35. "Language [i.e., place names] has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience" ("BC," 611).
36. Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent's Tale, 1988), xx;
37. italics in original. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
38. Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1994), 267. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
39. Gail Scott, Main Brides, against Ochre Pediment and Azure Sky (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
40. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960), 11.
41. The English equivalent of the French proverb-"Birds of a feather flock together"-stresses the collective, or even communitarian, character of personal identity.
42. Le Petit Robert defines hanter (to haunt) as follows: "Fréquenter (un lieu) d'une manière habituelle, familière" [To frequent (a place) in a habitual and familiar way];
43. "(en parlant des fantômes, des esprits) Frequenter (un lieu). On dit qu'un revenant hante cette ruine. 'Une maison hantée par des lémures'" [(speaking of ghosts, spirits) To frequent (a place). One says that a ghost haunts this ruin as "a house haunted by lemurs"].
44. On prosopopoeia and melancholia in "A Berlin Chronicle," see Shoshana Felman, "Benjamin's Silence," Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 201-34. "All of Benjamin's evolving subjects," she argues, "are implicitly determined by the conceptual implications of the underlying autobiographical prosopopoeia, of the mute address to the dead friend" (218).
45. "Today, however, when I recall its [the district's] old-fashioned apartment houses, its many trees dust-covered in summer, the cumbersome iron-and-stone constructions of the municipal railway cutting through it, the sparse streetcars spaced at great intervals, the sluggish water of the Landwehr Canal that marked the district off from the proletariat neighborhood of Moabit, the splendid but wholly unfrequented cluster of tress in the Schlosspark Bellevue, and the unspeakably crude hunting groups flanking its approach at the star-shaped intersection of roads-today this point in space where we happened to open our Meeting House is for me the consummate pictorial expression of the point in history occupied by the last true elite of bourgeois Berlin.⋯ In spite-or because-of this, there is no doubt that the city of Berlin was never again to impinge so forcefully on my existence as it did when we believed we could leave it untouched, only improving its schools, only breaking the inhumanity of their inmates' parents, only making a place in it for the words of Hölderlin or George. It was a final, heroic attempt to change the attitudes of people without changing their circumstances" ("BC," 604-5). See the section "A new and disturbing articulation" below.
46. "Coming to London meant moving into a life that already existed ⋯ to talk to other people for the first time, to go to places that already had a style, a history ⋯ to connect my life to other lives, even buildings and streets, that had an existence prior to mine" (Bartlett, Who Was That Man? xx).
47. Bartlett "celebrates" his "choice of [Wilde] as father and guide to the city" (ibid., 35).
48. The Montreal Massacre involved the killing, by a lone gunman at point-blank range, of fourteen women engineering students of the Ecole Polytechnique. The gunman separated the women from their male classmates in his determination to assassinate the "feminists." The event was reported across the country and around the world and has seen the construction of memorials in a number of Canadian cities, including Montreal.
49. These are "images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand-like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery-in the sober rooms of our later insights" ("BC," 611).
50. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 98. "The chronicler is the history-teller." He presents his tale for critical speculation as opposed to the historian, who is "bound to explain in one way or another the happenings with which he deals" (95 -96).
51. "If I chance today to pass through the streets of the neighborhood [the Tiergarten district, where the Meeting House was located], I set foot in them with the same uneasiness that one feels when entering an attic unvisited for years. Valuable things may be lying around, but nobody remembers where and in truth this dead district with its tall apartment houses is today the junkroom of the West End bourgeoisie" ("BC," 606).
52. "Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world turns directly and solely to them. In using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship" (Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," in Selected Writings, 1:449-50).
53. In his notes toward a method of historical construction, Benjamin writes, "I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse-these I will not inventory, but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them" (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999], [N1a, 8], 460;
54. (hereafter cited in text and notes as AP).
55. "Such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we separated from ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by shock" ("BC," 633).
56. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 116.
57. One passage of the "Chronicle" recalls "Genthiner Street" for being one of the streets least touched by the changes of the past thirty years and, at the same time, the most scandalized by "numerous prostitutes" who "established themselves [there] during the inflation period" ("BC," 602).
58. "Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show" (AP, [N1a, 8], 460).
59. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," trans. Harry Zohn, in Arendt, Illuminations, 256.
60. For a recent, comprehensive mapping of nineteenth-century London as "a milieu hospitable to male same-sex desire," see Morris B. Kaplan, "Who's Afraid of John Saul? Urban Culture and the Politics of Desire in Late Victorian London," GLQ 5 (1999): 267-314. Kaplan offers what he calls a " 'thick description' drawn from personal memoirs and correspondences, records of court proceedings, press accounts of notorious sex scandals, and a pornographic novel, of distinctively urban forms of life shared by men who desired sex with other men" (267). He covers three decades prior to Wilde's trial and adds many references to those already collected by Bartlett (who dedicates his book to John Saul), albeit without Bartlett's subjective narrative account.
61. Ross Chambers reads Who Was That Man? as indicative of a mode of counterdisciplinary narrative that he calls "loiterature." Against "disciplinary knowledge," which divides individuals into categories of identity, Bartlett's "loiterly" or "cruising" narrative collects evidence of connectedness "in which both self and other, being mutually defining, exist only as members of a community. ⋯
62. The story, in other words, is not only that personal identity-in this case, for gay men-is indistinguishable from belonging to a community but also that the community extends into the past. ⋯
63. The reason that it is important to establish this historical connection, as the book does, is that in producing Wilde individually as a homosexual the trial functions-in typically disciplinary fashion (i.e. as a kind of examination)-precisely to obscure his membership in a community, and hence to deny the existence of a specifically gay identity as a communitarian phenomenon." See Chambers, "Strolling, Touring, Cruising: Counter-Disciplinary Narrative and the Loiterature of Travel," in Understanding Narrative, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 34-35.
64. Walter Benjamin, "Paris-the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Charles Baudelaire, 167-68;
65. hereafter cited in the text as "Paris."
66. See Walter Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian," New German Critique 5 (1975): 27-58.
67. "He owned drawings by Burne-Jones and by Whistler, by Monticelli and Simeon Solomon, china, a library of rare editions, signed copies of the works of Hugo and Whitman, Swinburne and Mallarmé, Morris and Verlaine" (Bartlett, Who Was That Man? 173).
68. "Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde furnished and decorated their houses at a time when most men in London lived in shared rooms crowded with their families" (ibid., 180).
69. Bartlett refers his chapter "Possessions" to Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), sec. iv in Arendt, Illuminations, which, he says, "ends with the following astonishing admonition, which has animated all of my reading of Wilde ever since I realized I couldn't justify my fascination with his texts by saying he was a 'good writer.'" He then cites Benjamin: "'But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to [be] based on another practice-politics'" (Who Was That Man? 251). The author's astonishment over this passage does not, however, translate into a political analysis of the art of collecting and its role in the production of gay culture.
70. A passage from her poem "Hot Night" evokes a similar scene: "Hot night, wet night /you've seen me before. / when the streets are / drenched and shimmering / with them-self, the / mangy souls that wan- / der & fascinate its / puddles" (Eileen Myles, Not Me [New York: Semiotext(e), 1991], 51).
71. Though certain institutions do just that: the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center on West Thirteenth Street, the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, and the New York Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers, which compiles and publishes historic maps.
72. Myles, Not Me, 51.
73. See "Compensations of Poverty (Poems, 1942-1949)" and editor's notes in Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996).
74. David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 254, 259. See the chapter "James Schuyler: Things As They Are."
75. Cited in ibid., 263. "The 1970s were particularly difficult for Schuyler. He lived in nursing homes and fleabag hotels and burned down an apartment when he fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand. Schuyler knew some stability only after he moved into the Chelsea Hotel in New York City in 1979. He lived at the Chelsea for the rest of his life, and a plaque in front of the hotel's entrance informs guests and visitors of Schuyler's place among the writers-like Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas-who made this their New York headquarters. The Chelsea, a hotel with a history, was notoriously the place where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend" (263).
76. She enters his living space, which is also his place of work, in aroused anticipation of her own poetic/erotic possibilities. Standing in the clearing of his old apartment, she is so moved by the aura of dereliction and deliquency that she masturbates. "Just out of a hospital, almost killed himself. Jimmy Schuyler was my new job. Slowly I moved his possessions to the Chelsea from an 8th Avenue flophouse where on the final day among the dry cleaned clothes still in plastic bags, charred bits of poetry on papers, art prints books-I masturbated because it was a filthy interesting place" (Myles, Chelsea Girls, 274).
77. The title of Myles's book and chapter may allude to Andy Warhol's experimental film Chelsea Girls about free love in Manhattan in the 1960s. The collective character of her memory is fore grounded by the book's cover photo of a painting by Nicole Eisemann. The painting figures Amazons, reminiscent of Greek friezes but minus men and with women entangled in one another in what could be a war or an orgy.
78. In "An American Poem" the poet poses as a renegade member of the Kennedy family, exclaiming in mock confession: "I thought / well I'll be a poet. / What could be more / foolish and obscure. / I became a lesbian. / Every woman in my / family looks like / a dyke but it's really / stepping off the flag / when you become one" (Myles, Not Me, 14). In 1991 Myles ran for president of the United States on the strength of her ability to represent the unmoneyed, unpropertied, medically and socially uncovered, and dis-empowered street persons of America. See Eileen Myles, Collected Papers, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn.
79. The work of transforming "traumatic memory" into "narrative memory" entails painstaking processes of association. See Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," American Imago 48 (1991): 425-54
80. and Ann Cvetkovich, "Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture" GLQ 2 (1995): 351-78.
81. "Did you have your license on you, Toots? Sure Dad. The silence grew. ⋯ He walked slowly over to the fireplace, read it and dipped it into the flames for a moment until it lit up. He held it, looked at Toots. It flared and he dropped it on the flagstone and ground it with the toe of his black shoe. Then he grabbed Tootsie by the back of her jacket, shook her for a moment. She looked incredibly frail. He shoved her with all his might across the room. Piss for brains, he bellowed. It was so cruel" (Myles, Chelsea Girls,102-3).
82. For a narratological analysis of focus see Jennifer Henderson, "Femme(s) Focale(s): Gail Scott's Main Brides and the Post-Identity Narrative," Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en littérature canadienne 20 (1995): 93-114.
83. "In a memorable essay in the noted Surrealist journal, Minotaure, in 1935," Roger Caillois "suggests that mimesis is a matter of 'being tempted by space,' a drama in which the self is but a self-diminishing point amid others, losing its boundedness. Caillois tries to describe this drama in its most extreme form where the mimicking self, tempted by space, spaces out: ⋯ 'The individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space'" (Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 34). Tempted by the space of the city, Lydia dramatizes this "mimetic excess."
84. I refer to the dream-image in One-Way Street titled "Underground Works," where the dreamer unearths "a Mexican shrine from the time of pre-animism" in "the marketplace at Weimar," where "excavations were in progress" (Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1:455).
85. "In his Vague de rêves [Wave of dreams], Louis Aragon describes how the mania for dreaming spread over Paris. ⋯ This all in order to blaze a way into the heart of things abolished or superseded, to decipher the contours of the banal as rebus⋯ or to be able to answer the question, 'Where is the Bride?'" (Walter Benjamin, "Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism" (1927), in Selected Writings, 2:4).
86. Lydia's portraits of the Main recall the many photographic histories of Montreal, including Edward Hillel, The Main: Portrait of a Neighbourhood (Toronto: Key Porter, 1987).
87. As Sally Munt suggests, "the lesbian flaneur" who cruises contemporary urban sprawl full of shopping malls peopled with families must rally memory and desire from the fictions of literary history. "As I become a victim to, rather than a perpetrator of, the gaze, my fantasies of lesbian mobility/eroticism return to haunt me. [But] as I pursue myself through novels, the figure of the flaneur has imaginatively refigured the mobility of my desire. These fictional voyages offer me a dream-like spectacle which returns as a memory I have in fact never lived" ("The Lesbian Flâneur," in Bell and Valentine, Mapping Desire, 114-25). Scott's flaneur desires lesbian communion, but like Benjamin's flaneur remains impotent, enveloped in the aura of autoerotic fantasy. Her spectral brides, lovers of the city and projections (specularizations) of Lydia's lesbian desire, present further examples of what Terry Castle calls "the apparitional lesbian," a figure of lesbian (im)possibility, whose traces she reads throughout literary history.
88. See Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
89. Lydia's fantasy of women's space "recalls" those ritual spaces designated to the women of Greek antiquity. "The Adonia celebrated women's sexual desire; sweetly fragrant, drunken and bawdy, this aromatic festival set free female powers to speak about their desires in an odd and normally unused space of the house, the roof" (Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization [New York: Norton, 1994], 75).
90. See Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992).
91. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 257.
92. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ibid.
93. See, for example, the Web site put together by a collective of new narrative writers, Robert Glück, Mary Burger, Camille Roy, Gail Scott, and others, at >http://www.sfsu.edu/-newlit/narrativity<. In their first issue Glück's article "Long Note on New Narrative" traces the history of the emergence of new narrative as a writing form and as a writers' collective.
94. Gregory Bredbeck, "The New Queer Narrative: Intervention and Critique," Textual Practice 9 (1995): 477-502. Further references will be indicated parenthetically in the text.
95. "New narrative became at least marginally canonized as a critical term when, in 1984, Steve Abbot published his article, 'Notes on boundaries: new narrative,' which describes a loose but discernible group of writers including Boone, Glück, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Michael Amnasan and Dodie Bellamy. Over the last ten years the names associated with this school have grown in number to include, among others, Sarah Schulman, Bo Huston, Gary Indiana, Kevin Killian, the Canadian collective Dumb Bitch Deserves to Die, Dorothy Allison" (ibid., 477).
96. Glück understands new narrative to depart from language poetry in its refusal to "let narration go" and its determination to find a "better representation" of the problems and contradictions of being gay, lesbian, or working-class in a society of the commod-ity. He does not distinguish new narrative from gay and lesbian narrative, although he charges language poetry with being "very straight male." He argues that new narrative differs from "straight" narrative in its debt to György Lukács, Louis Althusser, and Henry Bataille, stressing the theory behind the practice of using metanarrative to critique and destroy narrative convention in the same moment that narrative is produced. See Glück, "Long Note on New Narrative."
97. Schulman sets all of her seven novels in New York City. Rat Bohemia (New York: Dutton, 1995) figures the city as a primary character. Schulman's nonfiction represents gay, lesbian, and queer activism in the context of New York City cultural politics. See Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994)
98. and Stage Struck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
99. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991).
100. See Dianne Chisholm, "Outlaw Documentary: David Wojnarowicz's Queer Cinematics, Kinerotics, Autothanatographics," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 21 (1994): 81-102.
101. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, acknowledgments.
102. Bredbeck notes that "all" new narrative writers "are familiar with postmodernist theorists such as Derrida, Bataille, Virilio, and ⋯ Kristeva," omitting Walter Benjamin, whom Glück includes among new narrative's formative thinkers.