„…you're unexplained as yet” - LGBTQ* Fiction 1920s-1980s-2020s

In this MA-Seminar, we are taking a diachronic look at five selected texts (four novels, one play) from English, Scottish and American writers to trace the recent lineage of LGBTQ* writing from the 1920s until today. Conscious of historical, political, and social developments, we ask ourselves what fictional works have contributed to discourses around LGBTQ identities and what challenges (editorial, aesthetic, personal) they and their creators have been facing. The focus will be on the works themselves, beginning with two classics of lesbian fiction, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Djuna Barnes‘ Nightwood (1936). We will then have a session devoted to queer history and developments in gender and queer stories before we continue with the English counterpart to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, namely Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994), a play about life with AIDS in the UK. With the Scottish poet’s Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet (1998), we turn to the representation of trans lives in fiction. The seminar closes with a discussion of Paul Mendez‘ Bildungsroman about black gay life in London, Rainbow Milk (2020).

All our analysis will be enriched and framed by recent scholarship from the field of gender and queer studies, especially texts by, for instance, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Sam McBean, and Elisabeth Freeman.