Bodies at risk

by Robert Burns Neveldine

Taking a fundamentally post-psychoanalytical approach, Bodies at Risk links philosophical and aesthetic issues in two distinct periods, with postmodernism continuing and amplifying the central concerns of Romanticism, including subject formation, the disruptive effects of the human body, and the unique forms of textuality they enable through risky personal and artistic conflicts. Neveldine investigates how the body, designated as queer or otherwise, has placed itself at risk, such that it has questioned dominant notions of what it is to be a human subject in Western society, roughly since the time of the Romantics. Neveldine also explores how certain kinds of artistic conflicts have played themselves out in various texts in the Romantic period and postmodernism and what these conflicts have produced, both corporeally and textually.