John W. Kluge Lecture

Gender, Genre & Pathetic Literature: A Reading

Since the 1990s the term “pathetic” has been thrown around in the art world to refer to a tendency of male visual artists’ work that made use of diaristic writing, stuffed animals, and crafts in a way that put an unconventional spin on gender. Eileen Myles’s anthology Pathetic Literature (2022) highlights the ways in which the “pathetic” has migrated to poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and theatrical writing, becoming as blurry as the gender of the person who wrote it. In this talk, Myles will talk about this new way of talking about thinking and feeling, about power and literary form, and read from their own poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist based in New York and Marfa, Texas. Myles is the author of twenty books, including the novels Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010), and Afterglow (2017), and the poetry collections Evolution (2018), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, and, in spring 2023, Working Life. Myles is the editor of Pathetic Literature, published by Grove Atlantic in November 2022. Myles’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, as well as grants from Creative Capital (nonfiction), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (poetry), and the Andy Warhol Foundation.