LGBT 4602

Queer Origins

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2016-2017 Catalog.

Exploring questions of narrative perspective in relation to embodied desire, this seminar will weave together four different areas of study: theories of perspective, focalization, narrative voice, and free indirect style; accounts of the history of the novel, particularly in relation to interiority and psychology; philosophical and psychoanalytic considerations of the relation between cognition and embodiment, abstraction and visceral reality; and works in queer theory that can be read as adumbrating an erotics of impersonality. Among other goals, the course will attempt to think about a tension within queer theory—between, most generally, the abstraction and specification of embodied desires.  That tension is not to be resolved; the particular case of narrative perspective might point to ways that, unresolved, it might illuminate queer theory's debt to, and relevance for, the literary.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

When Offered Fall.

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