What are the relationships among textuality, temporality, and sexuality? This course will explore the notion of queer time in a range of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. We will pay attention to textual theories and practices of repetition in several iconic modernist texts; the explicit engagement with retrospection, anachronism, and futurity in several contemporary queer literary and visual works; and the recent thematization of temporality in queer theory. Works studied will include Gertrude Stein's "Lifting Belly" and "Portraits and Repetition;" and Virginia Woolf's novel ORLANDO. Visual materials will include Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, as well as works by directors of the new queer cinema of the 1990s. The course will also introduce students to examples of recent theoretical writing on "queer temporality." |