Medusa’s Gaze and Geijerstam’s Gay Science in the Swedish fin de siècle

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A fresh and inspiring analysis of Geijerstam's novel that offers an interesting perspective to exploring fin-de siècle writing more generally.

It was a pleasure to read this well-written article. Only some small points:

row 197 missing preposition; 238 take away "andropause"; 266 Who is "Torsten"?; 283 Why "Commonsense" in the title of chapter 5; 369-371, I would rethink more critically the clause: women only serve as canvases to project male ideas?

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

            This essay offers a valuable reading of Gustaf af Geijerstam’s 1895 novel Medusas hufvud as an effort to envision a kind of male intellectual community bound together by the dynamics of a specifically homosocial (rather than necessarily homosexual) desire, albeit one that Geijerstam is nevertheless compelled to “dissimulate” about even as he articulates and explores its affordances. The author frames this argument as a corrective to historical-contextualizing scholarship that treats Medusas hufvud as a mere example of the literary trends of its time, from the breakdown of the social realism movement of the 1880s to the emerging fashion for decadent aesthetics. The paper advances its own position through a series of careful, well-attuned, and predominantly convincing close readings that refer productively and appropriately to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Roland Barthes, and Sigmund Freud. These close readings, to my mind, comprise the paper’s strongest moments, and are delivered in prose that is crisp and compelling.

            Though there is a great deal of merit here, there are a few issues that potentially impede the force of the argument. To my mind, the most pressing of these issues, in descending order of importance, are the essay’s use of secondary sources, its framing of the rhetorical occasion to which its argument responds, and its structure on the page.

1) Use of sources: Although the essay handles its sources effectively and with rigour, one would be hard pressed to describe them as reflective of current scholarship. The only especially recent text that the essay cites is Leffler’s 2019 edited volume, which it notably cites only in passing and without specific engagement. The next most recent pieces of scholarship (Lönngren and Leffler) date from 2007, followed by references to Gedin’s 2004 text and Schoolfield’s 2003 anthology of decadent literature, with the weight of the remaining scholarship being from earlier decades. The author’s argument is a valuable one, but I think its value would be more obvious for the reader if the author were to place the essay in more substantive conversation with sources written within the last decade.

2) Framing of argument: The author aims to distinguish the dominant “historical” accounts of Geijerstam’s text (in which they include readings that foreground the contexts of decadence and the breakdown of the 1880s movement) from the putatively neglected approaches via “the internal structure and movement of the text itself.” I can’t help wondering, though, if this isn’t, after all, a false choice. A queer rereading of the novel need not choose between engaging meaningfully with these contexts and treating the text as a “‘thick’ cultural artifact,” to borrow the author’s Geertzian turn of phrase. I would particularly welcome some degree of dialogue with recent work in the field of decadence studies (there would be an opportunity here, too, to address the concern above about the essay’s relative lack of engagement with recent scholarship). This is not to say, of course, that the paper ultimately needs to read Geijerstam’s novel as a definitively or essentially decadent text—I take the author’s point that there may be something going on in Medusas hufvud that is not exhausted by that discourse—but that some further treatment of the wealth of recent critical work in decadence studies by scholars like Matthew Potolsky, Kristin Mahoney, and Kate Hext would be appropriate, given that field’s interest in the conceptions of gender, community, and sexuality that emerge among the decadents.

3) Structure of text: Finally, I wonder if the present structure of the paper, which is divided into seven sections over the course of nine pages, is the most effective for its purposes. Given the relative brevity of the paper, each section is quite short, with some (section 5, for example) being little more than a paragraph long. This issue is more pronounced in the latter half of the paper, so I would recommend, perhaps, merging sections 4 and 5, which seem to be of a piece (and, in any case, the phrase “commonsense triangle,” the title of section 5, appears only in section 4). This change would help to lend a bit more balance to the paper and alleviate the effect of the rapid transitions.

These issues aside, the paper as it currently stands offers much that should be of interest to Humanities. There is a promising paper here, and I would like to see it published in some form, but I believe that it will require some revision to get to that point. These revisions need not reconstruct the paper or any of its sections from scratch, but they may be significant enough to require some time and consideration.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

In my inital comments on this article, I suggested three principal targets for revision: the paper's use of sources, its framing of the argument, and its structure. The author has addressed each of these points substantively and seriously, especially in their revision of the article's conclusion, which now nicely situates the argument alongside recent work in decadent studies. I am encouraged by these revisions, which have resulted in a stronger article--one that I would gladly see published in this revised form.