WGSS 237
Gender and Desire 1200-1600 Spring 2013
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed ENGL 237 / COMP 237
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The celebration of “courtly love” by medieval and Renaissance writers institutionalized the notion of the desiring male subject and the desired female object that continues to reverberate in contemporary culture. But early writers do not always, or even usually, endorse these positions uncritically, and even works that celebrate heterosexual love devote surprisingly large spaces to other kinds of desire. The Lover in the Romance of the Rose seeks to win the Rose, but it is the male God of Love he kisses on the mouth. Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night end in multiple marriages, but the plots revolve around cross-dressing and gender confusion. We will supplement literary readings with both medieval and contemporary theoretical texts. The aim of the course is to sharpen critical reading and writing skills across a broad range of literary forms and historical, cultural and aesthetic values. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this course focuses on varieties of sexual desire in major pre- and early-modern works, and the challenges they offer to our own contemporary values and assumptions.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3603
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation, four or five papers of varying lengths involving a total of 20-25 pages of writing
Extra Info: not available for the Gaudino or Pass/Fail options
Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
Enrollment Preferences: (in order): first-year students, sophomores who have not taken a Gateway course, upper-class majors who have not taken a Gateway, prospective Comparative Literature majors
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
Notes: meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under ENGL or COMP; meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under WGSS
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
WGSS 237 Division II ENGL 237 Division I COMP 237 Division I
Attributes: ENGL 200-level Gateway Courses
ENGL Literary Histories A

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