ENG331

Description

Modernist writers often use the term "queer" with what feels like a knowing wink. This is not an anachronism; though the field of queer theory brought the term into wider usage in the 1990s, the rise of literary modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century coincided with a shift in its connotations, as "queer" came to encompass not just difference or oddity, but difference of a specifically sexual variety. In this course we will explore queer modernism from multiple angles, reading works by authors who both lived and wrote about queer lives, tracing their engagement with emerging social and medical discourses of sexuality, and interrogating the role of queerness within modernist innovations in literary form. Taking an intersectional approach to the field, we will also consider how queerness overlapped with and complicated other discourses of difference, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. In addition to canonical queer modernists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, we will read authors who have been relegated to the margins of the field, including Richard Bruce Nugent, Eliot Bliss, and Gale Wilhelm, as we consider the relationship between queerness and canonicity. Our transnational approach will reveal both multiple models of modernism and a wide range of experiences of queerness. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will read widely in contemporary queer theory, focusing especially on texts that see difference as a site of potential solidarity and emphasize literature's power to challenge multiple, overlapping systems of oppression.