Spring 2010

SLA 380 • Sex and Gender in the Long Nineteenth Century

Course Description

This course will examine some of the most famous works of fiction from what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has famously termed "the long nineteenth century." Taking Helene Moglen's thesis on the emergence of the “sex-gender system” in the rise of the novel as a point of departure, the course will trace this system’s development from Goethe’s Elective Affinities to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and read these works in light of more contemporary gender and queer theory.

Grading Policy

Participation 10% 2 in-class presentations 10% each 5 page paper on theory 20% 20 page research paper 50%

Texts

Fiction: J. W. von Goethe: Elective Affinities Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary George Eliot: Adam Bede Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler Laza Lazarevi?: First Matins with Father and other short stories Lev Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata Kate Chopin: The Awakening Theory: Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 Tony Tanner: Adultery in the Novel Judith Butler: Gender Trouble Tim Dean: Beyond Sexuality (Course packet) Helene Moglen: The Trauma of Gender (Introduction) Julia Kristeva: Desire in Language (selections) Eve Sedgwick: Between Men (Introduction and chapter on Adam Bede) Gayle Rubin: "Traffic in Women" Michael Warner: “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood” in Que(e)rying Religion

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