1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910450815503321

Autore

Thompson Graham <1965->

Titolo

Male sexuality under surveillance [[electronic resource] ] : the office in American literature / / Graham Thompson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Iowa City, : University of Iowa Press, c2003

ISBN

1-58729-440-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (271 p.)

Disciplina

813.009355

813/.009/355

Soggetti

American fiction - History and criticism

Offices in literature

Sex (Psychology) in literature

Sex in literature

Men in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-243) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part One: Managing Desire; 1."Dead letters . . . dead men?":The Rhetoric of the Oce in Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; 2. "And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into":The Business of Sexuality in The Rise of Silas Lapham; 3. "A dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea":The Businessman and the Fairy Child in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt; Part Two: Postwar Unsettlement; 4. "The spirit of work weaves a magic wand":From Babbittry to Gray Flannelvia Tropical Incorporation

5. "Opaque glass bricks":Sloan Wilson's Gray Flannel Man in the Queer Organization 6. "I ascend like a condor,while falling to pieces":Fear, Paranoia, and Self-Pity in Joseph Heller's Something Happened; Part Three: A Word for Windows; 7. "My own plein-air Arnality bared to the sky":Shoelaces, Social Energy, and sexuality in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and The Fermata; 8. "Frank Lloyd Oop":Microserfs, Modern Migration, and the Architecture of the 1990's; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Sommario/riassunto

Male Sexuality under Surveillance is a lively, intelligent, and expertly



argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office. Graham Thompson interweaves three main threads: a historicized cultural analysis of the development of the modern business office from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present day, a Foucauldian discussion of the office as the site of various disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical discussion of the textualization of the gay male body as a device for producing a taxonomy of male-male relations. The combin