Dead Letters Sent

Kevin Ohi's University of Minnesota Press monograph makes a genuinely original academic argument: that 'thwarted transmission' — the failure of cultural inheritance — is not a problem to be solved but a revelation about how literary knowledge actually works. Reading Plato, Shakespeare, Wilde, Henry James, and Faulkner through a queer theoretical lens, Ohi develops a close-reading practice that merges queer theory with literary criticism. For graduate students and literary scholars, there is real intellectual work here, published by a credible academic press. But this is strictly for academic audiences — the prose and theoretical scaffolding are not accessible to general readers, and the queer-theory framework will conflict with traditional faith values. It is also miscatalogued as self-help, which it plainly is not. Know what you are picking up before you do.