Foundational Fictions: Sex, Gender, and the Literature of Statecraft

This course focuses on the family as a metaphorical model of the nation in order to analyze how the state interpolates the national body via education, marriage, and the demarcation of gendered spaces. We will study the trope of marriage in a range of genres, epochs, and political contexts in order to investigate, along the lines of Doris Sommer’s formulation, how the metaphor for social belonging that is the patriarchal family interacts with patriotism and statecraft to engender notions of productive citizenry. We will study the history of the second sphere, gendered education, the connections between biological and cultural reproduction, and imperial, national, and postcolonial renderings of political and social unions. In this class, we will ask how a national literature genders the national body and how state structures produce and reproduce gendered sexual alliances. Taking a long historical perspective, this course will consider how narrative and nation intersect and interact on issues of reproduction, education, and statecraft in the imperial, national, and postcolonial contexts.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

• Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
• Multicultural Courses: Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP)