ENGL359D Queer Modernisms

Selected study of a topic pertinent to literary and cultural expressions of LGBTQ+ identities, positionalities, and analytics through an exploration of literature, art, and/or media.

In this course, students will familiarise themselves with some of the main characteristics of modernism as an aesthetic and literary movement. Modernism emerged mainly in Europe and North America in the late-nineteenth century as a response to major developments such as the ‘industrial revolution’ and the resulting social change, and reached its height between the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, we will ask how queerness – understood as both an emerging sense of non-heterosexual identity, and a drive towards anti-normativity – intersects with modernist fiction and aesthetics. On the one hand, the period of modernism historically coincides with the consolidation of early forms of queer sexual and gender identity in the context of and as a response to sexology and psychoanalysis; on the other hand, queerness as an indulgence in deviance is arguably a constitutive component of modernist aesthetics and literary experimentation as such. We will explore the relationship between modernism and queerness by engaging primarily with literary texts from the period, but also more general contemporaneous discourses and retrospective theoretical framings of (queer) modernism(s).

Section(s):
0101 - Gero Bauer

Schedule of Classes
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