A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Series Q)
Moon (Disseminating Whitman, Harvard Univ., 1991), coeditor of Barbie's Queer Accessories (LJ 4/15/95), examines how the adult male artist productively revisits a remembered scene of himself as a "protoqueer" child being ravished by images of his own desire and later exploits aspects of the remembered (or fantasized) initiatory scene in his work. In the process, Moon argues, following Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, that sexual desire is not so much oriented by objects as it is disoriented by imitation. This highly original approach is made even more audacious by the array of texts examined: one chapter finds continuities between James's "The Pupil" (itself read intertextually with E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale "The Sandman" and Freud's essay on "The Uncanny") with the films Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger) and Blue Velvet (David Lynch). Other chapters (some previously published) explore James's account in old age of his teenage initiation into style (and homoerotic imagery) in French romantic paintings; Joseph Cornell's boxes; Fokine's ballet "Scheherazade," and Jack Smith's underground film Flaming Creatures; and the dynamics of male prostitution as portrayed in Andy Warhol's My Hustler and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Individual chapters are brilliant, if sometimes highly speculative; Moon is less successful in connecting these chapters into a coherently developed argument. Still, this is highly recommended for collections supporting graduate work in queer theory and cultural studies.?Robert W. Melton, Univ. of Kansas, LawrenceCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.