ENGL 18906 - Radical Love:The Politics of Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Institution:

University of Chicago

Subject:

Description:

This course tracks the emergence of our modern language of love, romance, and sexuality within the context of early nineteenth-century British literature, specifically in texts that explore the involvement of various forms of eroticism with political activity or belief. Using interpretive methods associated with Marxist and historicist literary criticism, students read literary texts politically, treat political texts as literary and cultural objects or artifacts understood to represent complex sites of both conformity and resistance to dominant paradigms of romantic desire, and of desire's political possibilities. Working together to develop a shared critical vocabulary, we read poetic celebrations of free love as well as a novel that insists on its practical impossibility; compare the rhetorical use and conceptual understanding of gender across class lines; investigate the discursive development of homosexuality and queer desire in a colonial context; and, most importantly, ask ourselves what is at stake when political questions are considered and conceived terms of personal, erotic, and affective relations between private individuals. A. Nersessian. Spring.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

WWW.UCHICAGO.EDU

Phone Number:

(773) 702-1234

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Quarter

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