Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (New Cultural Studies) [Hardcover]

Richard Halpern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002 | Series: New Cultural Studies

Starting with St. Paul's argument that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality to punish their excessive love of statues, Richard Halpern uncovers a tradition in which aesthetic experience gives birth to the sexual—and thus reverses the Freudian thesis that erotic desire is sublimated into art. Rather, Halpern argues, sodomy was implicated with aesthetic categories from the very start, as he traces a connection between sodomy and the unrepresentable that runs from Shakespeare's Sonnets to Oscar Wilde's novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Freud's famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Halpern's intriguing book traces an enigmatic core of ideas in some of the most beguiling works of Western theory, art, and literature. Highly recommended."—Choice

"A witty, provocative, and timely book . . . that takes much current discussion of gender, aesthetics, and sexuality one step further."—Sixteenth Century Journal

"This unique book will change and deepen the sense of what sexual desire has meant and means in the culture that we inhabit, and that inhabits us in turn."—Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University

"This is a criticism of nearly Nietzschean wit. Halpern goes about his intellectual business with a combination of deep levity and sustaining seriousness."—Joseph Loewenstein, Washington University

About the Author

Richard Halpern is the author of Shakespeare Among the Moderns. He is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 136 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812236610
• ISBN-13: 978-0812236613
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,952,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Who knows what the sonnets mean?, March 2, 2009

By 

Charles I. Campbell (Tappan, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (New Cultural Studies) (Hardcover)

Anyone led by the title to seek prurient interest in this book will be disappointed. So also will anyone hoping to end the mystery of why Shakespeare addressed the sonnets to a beautify boy and a "dark lady" of doubtful beauty if not worse. But after a second reading I now know Wilde was far more than a gay master of epigrams, that Freud was artistically sensitive (psychoanalyzing Leonardo) and interested in Egyptian art, that there was more to de Sade than meets the revolted eye, and that the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (as well as post-modern literary criticism), verge on the incomprehensible, as well as many other interesting bits from the pen of this erudite Professor of English Literature in the University of California.