Jonathan Goldberg

In Sappho, Jonathan Goldberg takes as his model the fragmentary state in which this sublime poet‚Äôs writing survives, a set of compositional and theoretical resources for living and thinking in more fully erotic ways in the present and the future. This book thus offers fragmentary commentary on disparate (Sapphic) works, such as the comics of Alison Bechdel, the paintings and cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Reid-Pharr‚Äôs ‚ÄúLiving as a Lesbian,‚Äù Madeleine de Scud√©ry‚Äôs Histoire de Sapho, John Donne‚Äôs ‚ÄúSapho to Philaenis,‚Äù Todd Haynes and Patricia Highsmith‚Äôs Carol, Virginia Woolf‚Äôs Orlando, writings by Willa Cather, and the paintings and writings of Simeon Solomon, among other works. Goldberg challenges readers to imagine and experience what Sarah Orne Jewett named the ‚Äúcountry of our friendship,‚Äù a love both exceedingly strange and compellingly familiar.  Just as Sappho‚Äôs coinage ‚Äúbitter-sweet‚Äù describes eros as inextricably contradictory ‚Äî two things at once, one thing after another, each interrupting, complicating, each other ‚Äî the juxtapositions in this book mean to continually call into question categories of identity and identification in the wake of a quintessential woman writer from Lesbos. Over and over again, Goldberg‚Äôs Sappho: ]fragments inquires into how race, sexuality, and gender cross each other. The theoretical genius of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick presides over this set of meditations and mediations on likeness and desire. Rather than homogenizing its many subjects, it invites the reader to explore and inhabit new transits within and through what Audre Lorde called ‚Äúthe very house of difference.‚Äù

Sappho: Fragments

Jonathan Goldberg

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