Overview

What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction? In historical terms, the particular question of flirtation has tended to be obscured by that of seduction, which has understandably been a major preoccupation for twentieth-century thought and critical theory. Both the discourse and the critique of seduction are unified by their shared obsession with a very determinate end: power. In contrast, flirtation is the game in which no one seems to gain the upper hand and no one seems to surrender. The counter-concept of flirtation has thus stood quietly to the side, never quite achieving the same prominence as that of seduction. It is this elusive (and largely ignored) territory of playing for play's sake that is the subject of this anthology. The essays in this volume address the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right. Drawing on the interdisciplinary history of scholarship on flirtation even as it re-approaches the question from a distinctly aesthetic and literary-theoretical point of view, the contributors to Flirtations thus give an account of the practice of flirtation and of the figure of the flirt, taking up the act's relationship to issues of mimesis, poetic ambiguity, and aesthetic pleasure. The art of this poetic playfulness-often read or misread as flirtation's ""empty gesture""-becomes suddenly legible as the wielding of a particular and subtle form of nonteleological power.

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Reviews

Flirtations makes an everyday practice and pleasure newly available to critical thought. Usually avoided as frivolous, lacking the disruptive grandeur of seduction or the power of the truly erotic, flirtation gets left aside as a minor social form. This volume, by turns deeply erudite and playful, effectively corrects this neglect. Many readers, no doubt, will share the temptation to show the authors the new etchings in their collections. --Martin Harries, University of California, Irvine Moving in a conceptual field characterized by levity, hint, diversion, intentional ambiguity, formal undecidability, and non-directed pleasure, flirtation serves as an alternative to strategies of seduction. As a model of engagement with people, objects, texts, or thoughts, it re-orients not only discourse on the erotic (in the broadest sense) and erotic practices (also in the broadest sense), but epistemological strategies. This beautifully executed volume brings the idea of flirtation to bear on wide-ranging, often delightfully unexpected materials, some well-known, some from the margins. Its authors are scholars dedicated to rigorous theoretical thought in conjunction with close literary reading, representing, to my mind, one of the most valuable traditions in the US humanities. --Silke-Maria Weineck, University of Michigan

Author Information

Lauren Shizuko Stone is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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