01 TTH4 CAC 12190 EXTRA MU-114
This is a course on sexuality—how it has been written, felt, and discussed—in literature of the twentieth century. We will close read a variety of texts—poetry, fiction, comics, film, academic scholarship. Possible texts include: Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, Wimmen’s Comix edited by Patricia Moodian, Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far by Adrienne Rich, excerpts from You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories by Alice Walker, and the film Moonlight directed by Barry Jenkins. In order to ground our discussions, alongside the literature, we will also do a set of critical readings on the history of sexuality. Some of the questions that this course will address are: How have the ways in which sexuality has come to be defined and understood shifted over time? What kinds of literary techniques and strategies have writers used in order to address sexuality in their work? How is our understanding of sexuality shaped by entanglements with other categories such as race, class, gender and disability? Throughout, we will trace a history of sexuality as seen through literature.