This course will explore the various ways in which gay and lesbian literary representation participates both within and around more canonical literary movements.  Focusing primarily on twentieth-century writings, we will concentrate on a literary tradition in which the invisible was made visible—in which historically marginalized sexualities took literary shape.  Possible topics may include the following: What strategies have lesbian and gay authors used to express taboo subject matter, and how have these strategies interacted with and challenged more traditional narrative techniques?  How does the writing of queer sexuality recycle and revise notions of gender?  What kind of threat does bisexuality pose to the telling of coherent stories?  How does transgenderism queer our thinking about gender and homosexuality? In what ways do class, race, and gender trouble easy assumptions about sexual community?  How have social and cultural moments (McCarthyism, Stonewall, the AIDS crisis) as well as medical and scientific discourses (sexology, psychoanalysis) affected literary representations, and vice versa?  We will work throughout the course to develop the kinds of reading skills that these texts demand, since an ability to read both the text and its silences will be essential.

Required Texts

Last update: 1/21/2010