Erste Sitzung: 27. Oktober 2016
Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.
"I cannot recall a time when I did not know that I was special." (Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 4)
In this course we are going to look at constructions of queer identities in Great Britain during the Thatcher years. Queer, as Annamarie Jagose puts it, "is very much a category in the process of formation," but it is generally understood either as "an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identifications" or "a nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies". The three texts selected for this course are exemplary for their representations of non-normative sexualities and their intersections with race and class. Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) connects the life stories of two men, one young and one old, and contrasts their experiences of gay life in Britain before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality. Jeanette Winterson's coming-of-age novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) tells the story of a young woman's coming-out in a rural and very religious community in the North of England. Stephen Frears's film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), based on the screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, talks about the romance between a young Pakistani who runs a run-down laundrette and his school friend Johnny, who is involved with a neo-fascist street gang.
Please read Hollinghurst's novel before the start of term.
Texts:
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Swimming-Pool Library. 1988. London: Vintage, 2015. Print.
ISBN-10: 1784870315 / ISBN-13: 978-1784870317
Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. 1985. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.
ISBN: 0 09 993570 8
(if this edition is no longer available, get this one: ISBN-10: 0099598183 / ISBN-13: 978-0099598183) |
