Spring 2007 Courses

ENGL 383-01: Introduction to 20th Century LGBTQ Literature (Hurley)

M 7:00-10:00pm, Old Main 001

This course is an introduction to the literature and theory of twentieth century queer sexualities across a range of texts that have come to be described, variously, as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer. Each week, our discussions will revolve around primary texts and theoretical readings that focus on the ways literature and sexuality each transforms the terms on which we have come to think about the other. We will explore, in other words, what is literary about the fantasies, heartbreaks, longings, and pleasures of sexual lives that in the twentieth-century have come to be defined in terms of minority identities.

At the level of close-reading, we will pay particular attention to questions of narrative voice and the language of literary world-making as we think about the following: the significance of literary circulation to the consolidation of sexually defined communities and subcultures; the queering of autobiography; the status of "passing" within African-American and transgender communities; the burgeoning of queer children's literature; and the recirculation/resignification of classic children's books (like the Wizard of Oz) as allegories for contemporary queer life narratives.

Required primary texts include the following:

• Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray 2nd ed. (Norton)
• Radclyffe Hall The Well of Loneliness (Anchor)
• E.M. Forster Maurice (Norton)
• Willa Cather The Professor's House (Vintage)
• Djuna Barnes Nightwood (New Directions)
• Nella Larsen Passing (Norton: forthcoming Feb. 2007)
• James Baldwin Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)
• Tony Kushner Angels in America Vol 1 and 2
• Gertrude Stein Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Vintage)
• Anne Carson Autobiography of Red (Vintage ) ISBN: 037570129X
• Geoff Ryman Was (Penguin Non-Classics) 1993 ISBN: 0140178724
• A selection of queer children’s literature
• Films: Boys Don't Cry and The Brandon Teena Story

We will also be reading theoretical texts by writers such as Lee Edelman, Heather Love, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D.A. Miller, Ellis Hanson, Phillip Brian Harper, Dwight McBride, and Kathryn Bond Stockton.

Spring 2007 Course Listings