ENG 7340: 20th/21st Century American Literature: "Queer(ing) Realism(s)"

IN 1979, JAMES BALDWIN said, “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.” This graduate course engages this work of incremental change and imagination through the intersections of 20/21C American literature and theory, genre and form, as well as history, geography, and popular culture to address the representations and politics of different identities, embodiments, and desires. We will put a range of texts into conversation from more “traditional” or “realist” texts to alternative, speculative, even radical texts, foregrounding queer(er) writers, artists, and theorists of color, to understand how they critique and challenge heteronormativity, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression. Texts may include Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sherman Alexie, Joshua Whitehead, Octavia Butler, Jeremy O. Harris, and Carmen Machado.