ENGL 105 - Literature X

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This is a new, team-taught introductory course that provides a 100-level English option for both non-majors and majors that showcases the power of literary and cultural study. It demonstrates in practice why historical literary and cultural contexts are crucial elements for understanding contemporary texts and the questions they care about. Through a team-teaching model, it shows students how the expertise of faculty members across the department speaks to each other’s chosen canons and questions. Authors, genres, critical and theoretical approaches, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Topic for 2022/23b: Passing. This course focuses on “passing” and performance in relation to gender and race. As a team-taught course with an interactive lecture component, it combines the three professors’ expertise on passing and racial melodrama (as well as queer of color critique), Shakespeare and performance theory, and gender-nonconformity in eighteenth century and Romantic literature. The syllabus spans different literary traditions and media, from crossdressing actors in Shakespeare’s time (to modern productions in which women actors are cast in “male” roles), to eighteenth-century “female husbands,” to racial melodrama and contemporary drag culture. Theorizing how to “do” the history of gender and sexuality—and looking at how that question shifts and moves with the imperatives of intersectionality—is a primary question motivating the course. The topic of “passing” brings the instructors’ work and research interests into conversation in a way that will productively cross the boundaries of time period and national tradition. Katie Gemmill, Zoltán Márkus, and Hiram Perez.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS