This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

Literary scholar Heather Love writes that, ""[w]hile queer is associated primarily with nonnormative desires and sexual practices, and transgender is associated primarily with nonnormative gender identifications and embodiments, it is both theoretically and practically difficult to draw a clear line between them...Whether and in what context these fields should be seen as distinct is a live question; however, queer and transgender are linked in their activist investments, their dissident methodologies, and their critical interrogation of and resistance to gender and sexual norms."" This seminar will dwell in the practical difficulties of this ""live question"" by considering how the enterprise of aesthetic literary criticism, which in some traditions, is based upon making ""normative"" judgements about the goodness/badness of literary texts, could possibly exist in the form of ""non-normative"" queer/trans* criticism. What, in other words, does it mean to make non-normative aesthetic judgements, if the faculty of judgement is inherently normative? The first two-thirds of this class will take us through foundational essays in queer/trans* criticism as well as the literary texts that have served as touchstones for this criticism. The latter third will encourage participants to develop prospective syllabi/reading lists that question and push against the limits of these texts.

All readings will be included in a printed course reader (whose purchase is strongly encouraged) and via bCourses.

This class satisfies the Literatures in English Major Requirement
https://english.berkeley.edu/major-requirements

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills