LI 204 - Topics in Literature

Course Description

"Courses focus on specific themes or topics, such as literature of the city, artists in literature, or coming of age. Topics differ each semester; all topics include literature in at least three genres (selected from poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama)."

Summer 2023 Topics:

Section 009 Literature of Queer Liberation 

This course is an introduction to the literature written by and/or representations of Queer revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on the period between the Stonewall Rebellion and the AIDS epidemic, this course examines literature’s place within the queer liberation movement, as a tool for effecting change. In particular, students will investigate the affordances of different literary forms and how liberation is connected to the generic conventions of novels, poetry, and manifests, or, often, the breaking of those conventions.

Section 011 Queering Medieval Literature 

Literature written between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries is often perceived as an assemblage of highly didactic religious texts along with allegorical narratives which strongly emphasize an idealized heteronormativity. There are, however, a surprising number of literary works which appear to question, challenge, and perhaps even subvert traditional readings of the material. This course will explore medieval literature through the lens of contemporary queer theory in order to examine the texts as artifacts resistant to conventional medieval conceptions of moral, social, sexual, and gender constructs. We will examine a variety of prose genres including the romance, moral treatise, exemplum, fabliau, and hagiography along with lyric and alliterative poetry and drama from both the Western and non-Western traditions.