Critically Queer

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6 
• Convenors: Professor Anthony Bale, Professor Heike Bauer and Dr Victoria Mills
• Assessment: coursework of 1500 words (10%), a 2000-word essay (40%) and an unseen examination (50%)

In this module you will become familiar with key debates in LGBTQ+ literature, history and criticism from the Middle Ages through to the contemporary period, and in different cultural locations.

Together we will examine issues of queer and trans history and historiography and texts of sexual and gender dissidence, combining theoretical perspectives and critical concepts with literary-critical tools such as close reading, interpretation and context-based inquiry. The emphasis is on critical practice (i.e. ‘queer’ reading and ‘queer’ writing).

The module will feature a wide range of literary and non-literary texts such as:

• fiction
• drama
• (graphic) memoir
• legal and medical documents
• visual sources.

Texts and films studied will include less well-known voices such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen and Sarah Waters alongside canonical writers like William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Virginia Woolf.

By the end of this module, you will:

• be familiar with queer practices of reading and writing in a range of contexts from the Middle Ages to the present day
• understand, and be able to compare and contrast, pre-modern, modern and contemporary queer texts and contexts
• be familiar with queer theory and related debates about gender and sexuality.