The Telling and the Untold: Literary-Critical Approaches to Narrative, Gender & Difference

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How has literature participated in people’s efforts to develop, understand, inhabit, and critique a range of ideas and practices concerning gender, sexuality—in tandem with other axes along which human identity, affiliation, and difference have historically been organized? Conversely, how have these topics, and ideas about them, affected the creation and reception of literary texts? Literature, literary thinking, and the forms of reading and critique both endemic and errant to literary study have all been foundational to the formation of those sets of ideas commonly known as feminist theory and queer theory. And these discussions—along with often overlapping areas of inquiry having to do with race and ethnicity, religion, kinship, and intimate relations—constitute key elements of literary and cultural studies today. In this upper-level seminar, we will read and discuss a range of literature, criticism, and theory, drawn mostly from the 20th century in the US, as we work together to generate accounts of what literary texts and literary-critical methods can contribute to our ideas about gender, sexuality, and other forms of social alliance and difference, and how these intellectual currents can shed new light on US literature. These discussions will help us develop fuller understandings of the roles narrative, language, and representation may play in processes of social formation and transformation more broadly. The readings in this primarily discussion-based class will consist of literary, critical, and theoretical texts. Assignments will include frequent reading responses, in-class writing prompts, research-based term papers, in-class presentations, and a contribution to a class anthology.