The Department of American Culture and Literature welcomes you to a talk by Matthew Helm titled “The Televisual Proscenium: Staging the Archive in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy”
When: 4 March, 2026; 16:30-18:00
Where: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)
GE 250/251: 15 Points
Abstract:
Critics have long approached Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982) in paradoxical terms: dismissed for its sentimentality, appeals to tolerance, and apparent assimilationist politics, yet celebrated as a groundbreaking depiction of sexuality and family life, especially for its influence on later television sitcoms. Such readings rely on a linear progress narrative that equates increased visibility with inevitable social change—an assumption the play unsettles through its self-conscious engagement with media technology. In media-archaeological terms, the stage becomes a site for excavating the archive, “rerunning” forgotten TV histories and enacting the intergenerational transmission of memory. This presentation is an excerpt from a work-in-progress book, Transmediations: Media Materialism in the Archives of Queer Literature.
Bio:
Dr. Matthew Helm is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. His scholarship has appeared in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Religion & Literature, Studies in the Novel, and differences.