An "Open Mesh of Possibilities": Thinking Queerness with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Archive

A LITERARY MIND

Reading and writing literature was essential to Sedgwick’s intellectual and creative work. She wrote poetry throughout her life, exploring questions about desire, intimacy, identity, and power that would become central topics in her research and teaching on nineteenth-century literature.

A pile of typed and handwritten manuscript journals.

The Warm Decembers Journal. Circa 1978-1987.

These pages are from a draft of one of Sedgwick’s long-form narrative poems, which she worked on for nearly a decade. Despite never considering this poem to be finished, she published it in her first book of poetry, Fat Art, Thin Art.

An accordion-style typed artist book with a collage of letters, stamped images of gentlemen, and bottles.
An accordion-style typed artist book with a collage of letters.

Untitled (Atmospheric Changes). Circa 2005. Artist’s book.

This accordion-style artist’s book is one of Sedgwick’s experiments with texture, materiality, and the physical form of the book. The collage includes rubber stamp images of and text by the nineteenth-century French author Marcel Proust. Proust’s writings profoundly influenced Sedgwick’s thinking on sexuality and queerness. This piece was displayed in the 2005 exhibition Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust at Harvard University.

A typed class handout with a stamped image of a man reading a book on a chair while raising his legs up.

“Some Heuristics for Reading 19th-Century Fiction” Class Handout. No Date.

This handout offers students a set of guiding questions for “close reading” nineteenth-century fiction. “Close reading” is a form of literary analysis that interprets narrative content and form. The close reading techniques Sedgwick taught in her classroom also animated her scholarship.

A book cover featuring a charcoal drawing of constructing wooden bridges.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. Methuen, 1986.

This book, substantially modified and enlarged, is based on Sedgwick’s dissertation of the same title, which she successfully defended at Yale University in 1975. In it, Sedgwick analyzes the traits that define the Gothic genre in British literature, focusing on such authors as the Brontë sisters and Thomas De Quincey.

A photo collage of people in a room.

Jacket Night at the ID450 Collective. Photocollage. July 15, 1988.

The ID450 Collective was one of several feminist collectives Sedgwick joined or helped found early in her career as a literary scholar. These groups sought to foster women’s intellectual and creative work. The ID450 Collective began as a reading group on the writings of George Eliot, a prominent nineteenth-century woman author, before expanding and shifting into the feminist collective. In addition to reading and discussing feminist texts, members practiced a collective writing process, which they called “Writing the Plural.”

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