Narrative at the Intersection of Queerness, Violence and War December 4, 2007

Tuesday, December 4, 2007
CLAGS LGBTQ Studies Panel

Participants: James Arnett, Jen Mitchell and Seamus O’Malley

These three papers take a look at fictional narratives of World War I, and explore the interstices of violence, queer subjectivity and the collective forces at work in war. Narratives like DH Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer, James Hanley’s disturbing short story The German Prisoner, Liam O’Flaherty’s novel The Return of the Brute, and even Radclyffe Hall’s infamous Well of Loneliness challenge paradigms like ‘nationalism,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘the state,’ ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘the law,’ and ‘class’ in ways that (mainstream) modernist fiction writers were unable to. These three papers represent recent and exciting queer scholarship emerging from the CUNY Graduate Center’s English department, and their work seeks to challenge the monolithic WWI-scholarship industry and reconceptualize historicized queer work.

Skylight Room (Room 9100), Graduate Center, 7-9 PM