Queer Spaces in 20th and 21st-Century Literature and Culture

How are queer spaces portrayed in literary texts and what role have they played in selected novels in the 20^th century? Has this changed over the decades against the background of LGBTQ* movements? What are queer spaces and why are cities such as London, Berlin and Paris significant in this context?

In this seminar we will deal with depictions of queer spaces in a selection of 20^th and 21^st-century novels, poetry and culture. Beginning with one of the first depictions of lesbianism in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), which takes us to 1920s London, we will turn to the flamboyance of 1930s Berlin nightlife in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and then end our survey of European ‘queer spaces’ with a trip to 19^th-century France and Lesbian Pulp Fiction in Dorothy Stratchey’s Olivia (1949). Our next stop on the itinerary will be a discussion of ‘cruising’, also in the context of travel writing, and a reading of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines(1987). To complement these engagements with (semi)fictional treatment of queerness we will read Richard Scott’s 2018 poetry collection Soho which takes us back to the violent and tender streets of London’s neighborhood Soho. 

Our discussions will be accompanied by theoretical readings from the fields of queer theory and spatial theory as well as engagements with a critical assessment of the role of activism in/for queer communities in the Anglophone context and on social media and in virtual spaces, exemplified by the history of the London bookstore “Gay’s the Word”.