WGSS 270 - Literature and Sexuality

Cross-Listed as ENGL 308

This course examines ways in which literary works have represented desire and sexuality. It looks at how constructions of sexuality have defined and classified persons; at how those definitions and classes change; and at how they affect and create literary forms and traditions. Contemporary gay and lesbian writing, and the developing field of queer theory, will always form part, but rarely all, of the course. Poets, novelists, playwrights, memoirists and filmmakers may include Shakespeare, Donne, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, or Henry James; Wilde, Hall, Stein, Lawrence, or Woolf; Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Frank O’Hara, Baldwin, or Philip Roth; Cukor, Hitchcock, Julien, Frears, or Kureishi; White, Rich, Kushner, Monette, Lorde, Allison, Cruse, Morris, Winterson, Hemphill, or Bidart. Alternate years. (4 Credits)