Double Talk

<p>Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad <i>The Waste Land</i> of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound) even the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together he argues in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent.</p><p>Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies the texts Koestenbaum explores – works of psychoanalysis sexology fiction and poetry – emerge as more complex more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.</p>