Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Emory University. His many books include Come As You Are, After Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists; Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility; and Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. His writing centers on early modernity but ranges from Sappho and Willa Cather to Patricia Highsmith and Todd Haynes in exploring questions of materiality and sexuality.
Saint Marks finds and forges material connections among things, images, and words. In these connections, Goldberg persuades us, the biographical subject exceeds his or her own life, living through matter. The book concerns Venice and its patron saint-what it means to construct the identity of each and then identify the one with the other, as well as the natural, historical, pictorial, and literary forces that undo such constructions. With chapters titled 'atmospherics, gravity, stones, and secrets, the book is a magisterial shift of the biographical and historical into the geographical that will appeal to a broad readership across art history and literary studies. -- Amy Knight Powell, University of California, Irvine