WGSS 396
Modern Pleasure
Last Offered Fall 2015
Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This course investigates modernist imaginations of pleasure, both sensual and aesthetic, with a particular focus on the ways that modernism’s formal strategies might facilitate queer representations of pleasure, intimacy, and desire. In tandem with our discussion of literary form, we will consider the crucial role that visual media, music, and community spaces, like Harlem’s cabarets and Natalie Barney’s sapphic salon, played in the collaborative production and transatlantic circulation of modernism. Authors likely to be studied include Oscar Wilde, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, and James Baldwin. We will read the work of sexologists and situate modernist literature in relation to early 20th-century scientific conversations about human sexuality and the nature of pleasure. Queer and feminist theory will accompany these texts and provide a framework for our analysis of modernism’s queer pleasures. This course satisfies the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it explores sexual difference and pleasure as historically and geographically specific categories, examines how these categories are socially constructed and contested, and considers the effects of power and privilege on individual sexual experiences.