ENGL 300 - A Queer Self-Assembly

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
When we say “individual,” what do we mean? Are there ways of thinking about the self that don’t fit neatly under that word? Queer writers from the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have built surprising ways of thinking through the self with character type and genre, ways that push back on our assumptions about what it means to be a unique individual. What do these alternatives offer to queer writers that more traditional ideas of uniqueness don’t? We will think through these questions with writing by James Merrill, Ali Smith, Djuna Barnes, John Ashbery, and Brandon Taylor.