English
Before and after Sexuality
Professor Matthew Rowlinson
Winter Half Course.
This course will concentrate on the nineteenth century, when the configuration of social relations between men underwent a drastic reconfiguration with the appearance of legal and medical discourses of perversion that constituted the homosexual. To work out what changed in the nineteenth century, though, the course will begin by studying two pre-modern texts whose nineteenth-century reception was an important site of contention in the discursive invention of homosexuality. Some theoretical and historical works will also be studied. The ways in which nineteenth century concepts of perversion were embodied in specific forms of literary work will be a sustained question in the course
Texts to be studied may include:
Plato, The Symposium
Shakespeare, Sonnets
P. B Shelley “On Love,” “Adonais”
Tennyson, In Memoriam
D. G. Rossetti, The House of Life
Pater, The Renaissance
Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”; “The Critic as Artist” “The Decay of Lying”
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol 1
David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality