Description

What Does it Mean to Transform?

Middlesex is the story of a character who changes profoundly in order to remain fundamentally himself. It’s about recognizing how risky and contingent any physical description is, and how ambiguous dualities can be blended into beautifully coherent wholes.

As the child of Bulgarian immigrants, Irena Yamboliev knows what it’s like to construct your own identity. In Looking Was Not Enough, she uses her background in biology and literary scholarship to put Middlesex into conversation with Barthes, Ovid, and other texts that examine the way our gender, sex, nationality, and culture can experience a metamorphosis. The result is an illuminating theory of our own self-formations.

Irena Yamboliev is a literary scholar who studies Victorian and modernist novels and poetry. She is interested in ornament and forms—literary but also visual—and in the mysterious potency of adjectives. She teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco.

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