Hauptseminar Gay Lesbian and Queer Literature from the 19th Century to the Present

This course surveys British and American Lesbian, Gay, and Queer literature from the 1890s to the present. We will read across genres--letters, novels, autobiographies, plays--exploring approaches to same-sex desire and forms of sexuality that are traditionally deemed transgressive. We will evaluate perspectives from Gay Studies, which typically examines the roles of same-sex desire across and among cultures and histories, and Queer Studies, which perceives sexuality not as biologically determined, instead defining desire itself as a cultural construction. We will read from the following texts, which include a famous love letter, a novel about -homosocial- desire, another about the isolation of lesbian love in the early twentieth century, another about a person who ages 400 years and changes gender, a lesbian memoir, two plays dealing with the AIDS epidemic among gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, gay man's memoir, a scholarly study of lesbians in the twentieth century, and a memoir of a transgendered person. Students should purchase all books, although we will read only sections of some. De Profundis Oscar Wilde King Solomon's Mines Henry Rider Haggard - The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall Orlando: A Biography - Virginia Woolf Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me - Larry Kramer Cures --Martin Duberman Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers - Lillian Faderman She's Not There Jennifer Finney Boylan, Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen WS 2009/10 Master, Master Dr. Knox Raab Melissa