Techniques of Nonfiction: Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Queering Nonfiction
ENGL 292
Fall 2026
| Section:
01
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| This course may be repeated for credit. |
Roland Barthes spent years of his youth convalescing in sanatoriums from tuberculosis. Of the temperature charts that accumulated at the foot of his bed, Barthes later remarked: "Every month, a new sheet was pasted on the bottom of the old one; at the end, there were yards of them: a farcical way of writing one's body within time." How to write a body? How to communicate its strange, sensual knowledge? And how to write of queer bodies -- those lives and selves marked by crossing, of gender, sexuality, of norms. Bodies concerned with metamorphosis, with form becoming other form.
In its disruption of supposed bodily norms, queerness powerfully destabilizes essayistic conventions. How then do we define queer nonfiction? What is queerness at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? What textures, dimensions, or discussions does it bring to nonfiction as form, genre, and critical discourse? Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Queering Nonfiction will explore queerness not only as content but as syntax, as form. The course will consider those works of queer creation that remove cishet-lenses for approaching, organizing, and understanding queer experience and literature. Instead, we will consider how the queer body emerges as rich center from which to rework ideas of embodiment and essay form. And from that center we will disrupt.
Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Queering Nonfiction is intended as an introductory survey of nonfiction genres and forms through the lens of queerness -- all while remaining circumspect about those same forms. In this way, we will learn through dynamic tension: understanding what generally defines a form or genre even as we question those same boundaries be they tenets of sequence, style, voice, or perspective. We will learn to simultaneously know and unknow, do and undo, strengthen and destabilize so that you might situate your own work in lineages whether as continuation, diversion, or curtailment, so that, to borrow from Zeyn Joukhadar, your writing may emerge -- "An untranslatable self toward which I am always arriving, always already here." |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (English) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
1. Natalie Diaz, ¿Fusings¿ in Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation
2. Zeyn Joukhadar ¿An Incomplete History of Trans Immortality¿ and ¿Starting Testosterone During Ramadan Led me to the Sacred in My Trans Self¿ (pdfs provided)
3. Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar
4. McKenzie Wark, Raving
5. Hilton Als, My Pinup
6. Pedro Lemebel, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles
7. Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus and Orlando, My Political Biography (film)
8. Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
9. Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Borealis
10. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
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Examinations and Assignments:
TBD |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course contributes to the fulfillment of ENGL major requirements: CW requirement, CW path (but not 300-level or upper-level workshop), elective.
The English department highly recommends that students be enrolled in only one CW course in a semester. If you are admitted to more than one CW course, the department requests that you choose one and let the instructors know during Adjustment Period. By doing so you will be considerate of instructors and other students.
*This course will be taught by Professor Lars Horn. |
| Instructor(s): Vogel,Danielle Times: ...W... 08:50AM-11:40AM; Location: TBA |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 2 | JR major: 2 | | |
| Seats Available: 7 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 0 | JR non-major: 1 | SO: 5 | FR: 5 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 1 | 1st Ranked: 1 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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