Literature and Consent

3 units

Western literature begins with a war fought over the raptus (abduction) of a woman, the theft of Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. It's no secret that the violent abduction and sexual assault of women plays a constant-sometimes central, sometimes incidental-role in myth, history, fictional narrative, and poetry from the ancient Greeks to today. This class will consider the omnipresence of sexual violence in English literary history (and its antecedents) and ask why it is there, what its effects are, and how it shapes the way we think about gender, violence, freedom, and desire. This course contends that literature and literary history are keys to understanding the relationship between culture and sexual violence, and, conversely, that attention to sexual violence is key to understanding literary history. Students will acquire a broad historical understanding of consent as it evolved in literary, legal, and philosophical discourses to become a concept that organizes sexual and political freedom. We will ask: Is consent the best framework through which to mediate sexual harm? Are there alternative ways to imagine sexual encounters? How do various media manage sexual experiences? From the medieval romance to the eighteenth-century pornographic novel, from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" to "The Handmaid's Tale," this course will interrogate how literary explorations of consent provoke theories of subjectivity, desire, and power.