Queer Plots: Narrative and Sexuality in 20th and 21st Century 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 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with the fiction of Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the twenty-first century, we will look at LGBT British, Irish 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 public responses to some of these fictions, and the changing discourses about gender identity, homosexuality, and sexual orientation that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of LGBT writers over the past century. Students will write three papers and be responsible for one in-class presentation.