“What Time Has to Do with Him”: Queer Temporalities in Robert Duncan’s The H. D. Book and “A Seventeenth Century Suite”

Abstract

istory as it is hegemonically understood today is inadequate to housing the project of queering,” wrote Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg in 2005 (1609). The claim is iconoclastic. Yet it articulates a widespread, even generational, sense of fatigue with the routinized practices of queer historicism and its foundational prohibition against anachronism. The years before and after Menon and Goldberg’s article saw an explosion of studies, loosely grouped under the name “unhistoricist,” which not only critiqued historicism, but reveled in the forbidden pleasure of anachronism.1 Indeed, such scholars sometimes treat anachronism as a specifically queer historical relation―adopting it as a queer method for studying history.2 Articulating the principles of this thennascent movement, Menon and Goldberg write, “Instead of being the history of homos, this history would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations