Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film, and literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Sex, or the Unbearable, a book he cowrote with Lauren Berlant, will be published by Duke University Press in 2014. This essay is excerpted from his latest book project, Bad Education: Why Queerness is No Good.