“Surprising Recognition”: Genre, Poetic Form, and Erotics from Sedgwick’s “1001 Seances” to A Dialogue on Love

This essay places Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s later writings on poetry alongside her early unpublished piece “The 1001 Seances” to illustrate how the latter theorizes the connection between poetic form (and its relation to the novelistic) and male-male homoerotics. I then consider Sedgwick’s continuing interest as both a critic and a poet in the erotics of genre, especially as it reappears in A Dialogue on Love.