ENGL 4755 - Sexology and the Novel

(crosslisted) FGSS 4755, LGBT 4755
(CA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

J. Lubin.

In the 1920s sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote a preface for Radclyffe Hall’s modernist novel of gender transformation, The Well of Loneliness, nominating it as a vital document in the sexual scientific record; by the 1960s, spurious sexological prefaces had become the norm for racy pulp fictions attempting to evade censorship law by feigning scientific merit. How does literature shift between serving as sexological data and transforming sexology into a literary conceit? How do literature and sexology variously define deviance, perversion, the normal and the pathological? This course will center the relationship between sexology and literature as two modalities for organizing the social meaning of sex. We will ask how sexology instrumentalizes literature for science, and how it generates new, different, and critical aesthetic strategies.