narrative & heterosexuality
course description
stokes
In a conversation with his friend and fellow writer Henry James, novelist William Dean Howells once asked how they “might eliminate the everlasting young man and young woman” from their fiction. In response, James suggested a novel “whose interest should center about a mother and a son”; needless to say, perhaps, this didn’t quite catch on. As Howells later recounted, James “is still writing stories, as I still am about the everlasting man and young woman. . . . I suppose we must always have them there, as we must always have them in life, if the race is to go on.” This rather odd move from a biological imperative (we must have them in life) to a narrative imperative (we must have them in fiction) is the focus of this seminar. Our guiding question will be this: How is the structure of narrative shaped by heterosexuality as a structure of desire? We will address this question through readings in narrative theory and critical heterosexuality studies, and through the close study of primary texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including novels, films, and recent cultural debates).
Work includes intensive reading and writing, culminating in a major research paper.