LIT 2081 Spring 2024

In the past few decades there has been an explosion in both queer literary production and theoretical frameworks for understanding queer cultures. What is queerness? What does it mean to be queer? And how do we position queerness as a literary, cultural, theoretical, or political phenomenon? These are some of the central questions this course will investigate, as well as interrogating the concepts of psychical and social identity, gender, sexuality, normativity, and the poetics of self. In so doing, this course will focus on both canonical and more recent works of fiction, poetry, film, philosophy, and other genres which take queerness as a guiding motif.