Our lives could easily be defined by our intercourse with others. “Modernist literature” might be described as a representation and reaction to the alienation, or the increasing lack of intercourse, instigated by industrial capital’s contortions of social relations in the 19C and 20C. “Postmodernism literature” might be described as a representation and reaction to the ever-increasing (even hyper-) mediation of those social relations and the hyper-commodification of the other (often constituted as the embrace of diversity and multiculturalism). This class will trace some of the negotiations of this shifting intercourse with others, primarily by unpacking the cultural representations of the “other” we call stereotypes, as we read through the literature of the 20C. This class will think through the role of literature in negotiating, reinforcing, and challenging how we are defined and how we define others through social categories. Because race is the salient social category through which “America” is lived and sexuality is a salient way that race is constituted, this class will focus on reading representations of the negotiation of the intersection of these two modalities of power. To this end, we will mark the temporal and epistemological turn from “modernism” to “postmodernism” by asking how literary representations of the experience with this intersection change as these aesthetic, political, socio-cultural, interpretive, and theoretical shifts take place. We will read literature as one among many multiple, shifting discourses within the broader discursive formations of modernism and postmodernism. That is, we will read literary texts intertextually in and through the intercourse that deploys sexuality to define racial categories (and vice versa) in U.S racial/sexual formation.

Texts may include James Baldwin’s Another Country, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices. Other potential texts include the poetry of John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara, Langston Hughes and/or Allen Ginsburg, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and writings by William Burroughs, Gloria Anzaldúa, Samuel Delaney, and Fae Myenne Ng. We will temper our literary readings with literary criticism on selected readings, critical/theoretical essays (by Sander Gilman, Scott Pickering, Homi Bhabha, José Muñoz, Eileen Boris), and primary historical texts (such as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma).

A decent grade will depend heavily on class participation and engaged interrogation of each day’s reading as well as weekly response postings, a mid term and final project.