Queer Plots: Narrative, Gender, and Sexuality in 20th and 21st century British & American Fiction

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How do you tell a story that is supposed to be unspeakable? In this course, we will investigate the ways in which LGBTQ writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with Oscar Wilde's 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the twenty-first century, we will look at LGBTQ British and American writers whose work engaged with or dramatically departed from the dominant conventions that typically shaped fictions of identity formation, of love and marriage, of sexual experience, of political protest, and of death and loss. We will also investigate important moments in queer history, and the changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, and identity that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of LGBTQ writers over the past hundred and thirty years.