Department of English

This course explores the intersection between narrative form and representations of sexuality in the modern novel. We will consider a range of aesthetic responses to new regimes of sexuality that developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We will pay special attention to questions of authenticity and artifice and to narrative techniques of indirection, secrecy, and suggestion. We will read these texts for their account of the complexities of desire and identification; at the same time, we will situate them within larger cultural narratives of aestheticism, psychoanalysis, racial crossing, decadence and perversion, feminism, empire, and “the closet.” Readings by Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Vladmir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga, and Jackie Kay. A few short papers, a longer final paper, no final exam.