Gender and Sexuality in Modernist Literature

How did gender and sexuality shape modernist literature? Modernism is still often portrayed as a predominantly male phenomenon, enshrining writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, and creating a cult of artistic genius around which minor figures of modernism orbit. Drawing on both established and more recent interrogations of this narrative, this course will read texts that make clear the centrality of gender and sexuality to modernist aesthetics. We will read poetry and prose by authors including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Claude McKay, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys, among others, and foundational theoretical and critical work by Rita Felski, Andreas Huyssen, Janet Lyon, Miriam Hansen, and others.