Tiresian Poetics
Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001

Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries.

Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed and embodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has come to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualities.