faculty supervisor
Jan
Cooper (wonder why
am I doing this?)
office King 139-D
phone x8613
email Jan.Cooper@oberlin.edu
meeting times 4-6 pm Friday, Jan. 7, then 4-6pm Tuesdays and Thursdays for the following 3 weeks
description
This won't be the usual grits and banjoes view of the American
south. We'll study works by several post WWII southern writers who
were or are known publicly to be lesbians, gay men, or bisexuals and
in whose writing issues of region, race, sexuality, gender, and
economic class interact particularly vividly in characters' lives.
We'll read at least three major works each week and discuss them in
two group meetings per week. Before discussions we'll share reading
journals via email and write a final reflection on the reading and
discussions to be "published" among the whole group in whatever form
the group decides. Works we read will include both fictional and
non-fictional narratives in a variety of prose genres.
schedule of readings (and its problems)
electronic reading journal
exchange
To help our group discussions get off to a strong start, I'd like
everyone to email an advance reading journal to everyone else in the
group before each meeting. Think of this writing as purely
exploratory. Use it as a way to sort out your reactions for yourself
as impressionistically as you'd like. Don't worry about thesis
statements or logic or hyper- correctness in grammar and mechanics,
just start talking to us about what you've read. Feel free to
question as well as declare, to speculate rather than
document.
final projects
I'd like everyone to write a final piece of some sort that
captures whatever conclusions or clarifications we've each found
through the project. This may still be a very speculative piece, but
in it we should try to consolidate our thoughts and observations. It
may be a rumination about one particular work you've read or a
discussion of one idea or technique you've observed in several or all
of the works. The specific form of this piece will be up to you. I
would also hope that we can somehow gather all of these pieces in one
location (a photocopied compilation? a website?) where we can look at
them all together and create some sense of group accomplishment. We
will discuss this further as we get into the project, however, and
decide as we go along what will be reasonable to do at the
end.
*Why do I
use that terrible word "queer" when talking about this subject
matter?
I appreciate that for many people the word "queer," especially
used as a labeling noun or adjective, is associated with deeply
painful memories of violence and discrimination. At Oberlin, however,
as in many other communities, it has been reclaimed to connote a form
of activism that confronts old impulses to hide sexual orientation
and is inclusive of a wider range of definitions of sexual minority
than the traditional terms of "lesbian" and "gay." It has also
evolved as a standard term in literary studies for scholars who are
re-centering our notions of the importance of sexual identities as a
critical lens for examining literature. I hope that turning the word
into the verb "queering" challenges its history as a form of abuse
and emphasizes its reclamation by making it something done for
affirming purposes.