Department of English

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby describes Daisy Buchanan’s voice as “full of money”; Daisy herself describes her “white girlhood” growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. In this novel, as in so many others in American literature, desire, race, and class cannot be disentangled. In this class we will explore this knotted history in American life and literature by reading a range of 20th c. and 21st c. novels. We will consider the dynamics of cross-racial desire and antipathy; wealth and poverty as erotic categories; sex and race in the workplace; the racialization of labor; the place of Europe in the US imagination; and the class politics of trans life.

Texts may include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Richard Wright, Native Son; Ann Petry, The Street; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues; Myenne Ng, Bone; Helena Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Justin Torres, We the Animals; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous and the film Winter’s Bone (Granik, 2010).