Introduces features of what might be called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer literary and theoretical tradition. Uses classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary literature, criticism, and film to examine the complicated status and experience of non-majority sexualities and genders. Considers writers, theorists and activists who have explored the relationships among sexuality, gender, knowledge, and literature, including Alison Bechdel, Plato, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Oscar Wilde, Nella Larsen.

How can literature’s imagined worlds help us better understand climate and climate change? In this course, we’ll consider how literature represents climate and how thinking about climate can help us better understand how literature makes meaning. How are climatological terms like atmosphere and scale helpful for reading literature? What does a genre like climate fiction, or cli-fi, ask us to consider? Does global catastrophic climate change mean humans are now at the whim of a threatening natural world, or is this the ultimate expression of human control over their environment? Topics we’ll consider include the breakdown of the split between nature and culture; environmental justice; toxicity and pollution; and the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch in which the human species can now be considered a geological force.