English 100

Other Readings and Media

Barnes, D: Nightwood; Faulkner, W: The Sound and the Fury; Ford, F: The Good Soldier; Forster, E: A Passage to India; Freud, S: Dora; Larsen, N: Quicksand and Passing; James, H: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels; Joyce, J: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Rhys, J: Wide Sargasso Sea; Wilde, O: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings; Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway

Description

Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidinal fuel; and on the other as the freeing of desire from the burden of reproduction, and of language from the burden of reference. Sexual and literary experimentation went hand in hand, but their intersections varied considerably. At the end of the twentieth century, a different phase of the sexual revolution produced a set of intensive theoretical debates about the construction of gender and sexuality. In this course, we will read back and forth across the century to stage a series of encounters between the narratives and practices of literature and theory. Three 5-7 page papers will be required.