ENGL 4902

Queer Origins

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

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.

When Offered Fall.

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

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