Reading & Composition

The philosopher-historian Michel Foucault famously declared that, far from being repressed, discourse about sex has exploded since the nineteenth century. We talk about sex at school, in church, at government policy debates, to our doctors, to each other, and sometimes even to our partners. We form identities around whom we have it with, how often, in what way, under what circumstances. And the apparatuses of the nation-state strive to prod, shape, and channel our talk about sex, even to the point of assigning and removing rights based on it. 

In this course, we will trace a broad and idiosyncratic history of the ways sex has been talked about and represented, primarily in anglophone and Germanophone literature, philosophy, and theory. How did sex come to be the topic of so much conversation? What does our talk—or silence—about sex say about the changing ways we have understood our own identities and their formation? How do other structures of identity—race, class, gender, and more—shape our sexual identities, and how does our talk about sex in turn structure the ways we think about these categories? What are our ethical obligations and aesthetic commitments when we represent sex
in art? What makes sex a subject that needs so much theorization and yet seems to resist it? Together, we will ask these questions while reading and watching across a range of eras, genres, and geographies, including medieval sexcapades, bourgeois domestic novels, psychoanalysis, decadent kink fantasies, queer theory, porn studies, and more.

This is a Reading &Composition course, and our main objective will be to develop critical reading and writing skills. To that end, substantial class time will be devoted to writing workshops and peer reviews. In addition to completing frequent essay assignments and revisions, students will be expected to read up to 100 pages of literary and scholarly texts each week, and to participate actively in class and virtual discussions.
Possible texts from which to select the reading list:

 Theory / Non-fiction
o History of Sexuality Part I, Michel Foucault
o Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
o Wilhelm Reich
o Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick
o “Is the Rectum a Grave?” or Homos, Leo Bersani
o Hard Core, Linda Williams
o Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Andrea Dworkin
o A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, Nguyen Tan Hoang
o Gayle Rubin
o Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, Juana María Rodríguez
o Countersexual Manifesto, Paul Preciado

 Literature / Art
o “Wife of Bath” in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

o Pamela, Samuel Richardson
o Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
o Passing, Nella Larsen

o The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
o The Marquise of O, Heinrich von Kleist
o Venus in Furs, Leopold von Masoch
o Portraits by Egon Schiele
o Traumnovelle, Arthur Schnitzler / Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick
o The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil
o The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek / La Pianiste, Michael Haneke