ENG 6939 Summer 2023 Wilson

Summer
2023
ENG 6939
Topics in English: ‘More Beautiful. Though Less Human’: A Poetics of Nonbinary U(n)topias
L. Lamar Wilson

Two decades before she published her polemic indictment of slavery “The Battle of the Republic” in The Atlantic, Julia Ward Howe crafted an incomplete tale of an intersex person—“one presenting a beautiful physical development, and combining in the spiritual nature all that is most attractive in either sex” who would be “the poetic dream of the ancient sculptor, more beautiful, though less human, than either man or woman”—that remained lost in the archive until scholar Gary Williams curated its fragments as Laurence manuscript/The Hermaphrodite (U of Nebraska P, 2004). Using Ward’s fraught utopia as a palimpsest, this course will mine cross-genre works from the last 150 years, alongside formative scholarly interventions in gender studies by Hortense J. Spillers, Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, and Roger Reeves, in search of new insights on the fictions about the binaries that bind—and divide—our own contentious moment, one not unlike Ward’s. In addition to her manuscript, we’ll choose six to eight works among canonical texts such as Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Sherwood Anderson’s “The Man Who Became a Woman,” Djuana Barnes’s Nightwood, Virginia Prince’s Transvestia, Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, Pauli Murray’s Dark Testament, Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes, and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning and recent standouts such as Tarell Alvin McRaney’s Wig Out!, Awkward-Rich’s Dispatch, Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet, torrin a. greathouse’s Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, and the blockbuster phenomenon Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Requirements: This course fulfills the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. It also fulfills the Alterity requirement.