Presented as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series

Taking its cue from Christopher Nagle’s analysis, through the lens of queer theory, of the ‘eroticized benevolence’ at the heart of the eighteenth century literature of sensibility, this paper reads alongside each other two ‘sentimental encounters’ that blur the lines between sympathy as a response to suffering, and as an opening to ‘the imagined possibilities of unlimited intimacy’. Samuel Beckett’s 1946 story Le Calmant, later translated as ‘The Calmative’, reproduces a number of details from Tristram’s famous encounter with ‘poor Maria’ in Tristram Shandy in a manner that, rather than simply parodying its sentimentalism, plays up the queer eroticism of the sentimental encounter.

Dr Russell Smith teaches English in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU.

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