Literature and Sexualities

8G:11  Literature and Sexualities (Cultural Diversity or Humanities)

This is not a class about pornography. This is not a class about sexual pleasure. Leave the Playboys, Cosmos, and the romance novels aside.  How does literature do sexuality? How do plays, poems, and novels expand or irritate our understanding of sexuality and identity? Keeping in mind gender, age, race, and social background, we will critically examine what it means to develop a sexual identity or to have one constructed for you.  As a result, we will stretch, trample, and bend “accepted” definitions of sexuality in order to make space for the "contested" or invisible sexualities that societal pressure—and sometimes prejudice—can repress. 

Specific Course Description and texts used in recent versions of this course

• Section One
• Section Two

Texts that have been used in recent years for this course.  (This is a comprehensive list.  During any particular semester, only a few of these texts or similar ones will be used for each specific section of 8G:11)

Fiction

Short Fiction

• Allison Dorothy, Trash (NAL Plume)
• Allison, Dorothy, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (NAL Plume)
• Birtha, Becky, Lover's Choice (Seal Press Feminist Pub.)
• Girodias, Maurice, Olympia Reader (Blue Moon Books) (The short stories are from both well-known and respected authors to the less famous.)
• Raphael, Lev, Dancing of Tisha B'av (St. Martin's Press)

Novels

• Aidoo, Ama Ata, Our Sister Killjoy (Addison Wesley)
• Baldwin, James, Another Country (Random House)
• Brown, Rita Mae, Rubyfruit Jungle (Bantam)
• Cather, Willa, My Antonia (Penguin)
• Dixon, Melvin, Vanishing Rooms (Cleis Press / Publishers Group West)
• Hall, Radclyffe, The Well of Loneliness (Doubleday)
• H.D. (Doolittle, Hilda), HERmione (Norton)
• Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia (Penguin)
• Larsen, Nella, Quicksand and Passing (Rutgers University Press)
• Leavitt, David, The Lost Language of Cranes (Houghton Mifflin)
• Macauley, Stephen, The Easy Way Out (Washington Square Press)
• Maupin, Armistead, Tales of the City (Harper Collins)
• Melville, Herman, Billy Budd and Other Tales (NAL)
• Monette, Paul, Borrowed Time (Harcourt Brace)
• Muhanji, Cherry, Her: A Novel (Aunt Lute Books)
• Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita (Random House)
• Rechy, John, City of Night (Grove Pr.)
• Waters, Sarah, Tipping the Velvet (Riverhead Books/Penguin)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin)
• Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Grove Pr.)
• Winterson, Jeanette, Written on the Body (Random House)
• Wojnarowicz, David, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Random House)
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (Norton)
• Woolf, Virginia, Orlando (Harcourt Brace)

Drama

• Barnes, Noreen and Nicholas Deutsch, Tough Acts to Follow: One Act Plays on the Gay-Lesbian
  Experience (Alamo Square Press)
• Fierstein, Harvey, Torch Song Trilogy (only available by Samuel French as a script version)
• Kaufman, Moises, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (Random House)
• Kaufman, Moises, The Laramie Project (Random House)
• Kureishi, Hanif, My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings (Faber & Faber)
• Kushner, Tony, Angels in America (Theatre Comm.)
• Moraga, Cherrie, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (also Giving Up the Ghost and Shadow of a Man)
  (Univ. of New Mexico Press)
• Osborn, ed., The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the Aids Crisis (Theatre Comm.)
• Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night (NAL)
• Sherman, Martin, Bent (Applause Theatre Books)
• Vogel, Paula, How I Learned to Drive in The Mammary Plays (Theatre Comm.)
• Wagner, Jane, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Harper Collins)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (Random House)
• Williams, Tennessee, Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (NAL) (Contains Summer and Smoke, Orpheus
  Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Period of Adjustment.)

Poetry

Poetry Anthologies

• Klein, Michnd, ed., Poets For Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to Aids
• Morse, Carl and Joan Larkin, eds. Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time: An Anthology

Poetry Collections

• Crane, Hart, The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Norton)
• Dickinson, Emily, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Little Brown)
• Ginsberg, Allen, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 (Harper Collins)
• Housman, A.E., The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman (Henry Holt)
• Rich, Adrienne, Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-1977 (Norton)
• Rossetti, Christina, Goblin Market (Dover)
• Sappho, Sappho: Poems and Fragments, tr. Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Pub.)
• Shakespeare, William, The Sonnets and Narrative Poems: The Complete Non-Dramatic Poetry
  (with New Literary Criticism and an Updated Bibliography), ed. Burto (NAL)
• Tennyson, Lord Alfred, In Memoriam, A.H.H. (Norton)
• Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass (Bantam)

Non-Fiction: Essays and (Auto)biographies

• Essays and (Auto)biographies:
• Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands: La Frontera/The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
• Bornstein, Kate, Gender Outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us (Random House)
• Bornstein, Kate, My Gender Workbook (Routledge)
• Colapinto, John, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl (Harper Collins)
• Duberman, Martin, Cures (NAL Plume)
• Duberman, Martin Baumal, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey, Jr., Hidden From History: Reclaiming
  the Gay and Lesbian Past (NAL Plume)
• Freud, Sigmund, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, intro. Phillip Rieff (Simon and Schuster)
• Freud, Sigmund, Psychopathology of Everyday Life/The Interpretation of Dreams/Three Contributions
  to the Theory of Sex/Wit (Modern Library/Random House)
• Heger, Heinz, The Men with the Pink Triangle (Alyson Pubns.)
• Kramer, Larry, Reports From the Holocaust (St. Martin's Press)
• Lorde, Audre, Sister/Outsider (Crossing Press)
• Mavor, Elizabeth, ed., A Year With The Ladies of LLangollen (Penguin)
• McCloskey, Deirdre, Crossing: A Memoir (Univ. of Chicago Press)
• Plato, On Homosexuality: Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium, tr. Benjamin Jowett (Prometheus Books)
• Rich, Adrienne, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Norton)
• Thompson, Karen, Why Can't Sharon Kowalski Come Home? (Spinster Ink)
• Whitbread, Helena, ed., I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840 (New York Univ. Pr.)
• Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Harcourt Brace)

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