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Bersani in Love
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 32, Number 3, Fall 2011
- pp. 195-203
- 10.1353/hjr.2011.0021
- Article
- Additional Information
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“Bersani in Love” argues that Leo Bersani and Henry James bear a non-relational relation that exemplifies two overlooked focuses of Bersani’s scholarship: history and love. The article examinies how Bersani admires James’s depictions of betrayal and lying as destabilizations of epistemological certainty and how Bersani criticizes James for suturing that instability with a superior narratorial consciousness. Bersani’s love in betrayal of James throughout his career offers not only a practical example of Bersani’s own socio-sexual ethics but also a history of the novel in which James functions as the fulcrum where literary realism betrays itself and where literary desire must learn to love better.