Elizabeth Blake, PhD: Modernist Poetics and Queer Fruit

Forbidden fruit has long been a convenient metaphor for illicit knowledge and sexuality, a trope easily traced to the garden of Eden. Modernist poets deployed this familiar figure in new ways, insisting on the fleshy materiality of fruit as a way of representing other forms of fleshly pleasure. In her recent book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, Clark University professor Elizabeth Blake examines this phenomenon as part of a larger exploration of the ways queer consumption restructures modernist literary forms. In this talk, Blake focuses on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and H. D.’s “Priapus” to discuss the way modernist poets disrupt lyric traditions by setting intertextuality and phenomenological referentiality in tension in order to explore queer experience.