Card-index course
American Literature : Queer American Literature
Responsible Faculty: Faculty of Arts
Teacher(s): Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
Lecturer(s): -
No timetable defined.
Seminar
Spring semester
2 hours per week
28 hours per semester
Teaching language(s): English
Public: Yes
Credits: 0
Content
This course will begin with an intense immersion in several key texts of what is called Gender Studies or Queer Theory, including the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, and then introduce, or rather, re-introduce, students to the history of queer writing in American literature. I say "re-introduce" because many of the authors we will read will already be familiar to students, but what will be new is the awareness that gendered identity and sexuality are central issues in their writing and that reading them with these issues in mind can make their work understandable in new ways. We will also explore the work of writers that students may be less familiar with, but whose work constitutes an important tradition of queer literature. The emphasis will be on the way in which gender and sexual identity are performed, interrogated and constructed through writing. The authors that we will treat may include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Allan Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich.
Evaluation
Validation will be based on a midterm assignment, a final essay, and an oral presentation.
