Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility

Tracing an ambivalence toward pleasure from the early modern to the modern era, McEleney shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility, arguing that in playing with futility we may be able to move beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.