Kissing Books: Queer Romance

Catalog description

There's a moment in the movie The Princess Bride when, listening to an adventure story, a kid worries that this might be a "kissing book." This course takes kissing books as places where "romance" and "fantasy," two overcharged words and two overlapping genres, are stages for our enjoyment. If medieval romances give us a template for narrating desire, and if medieval monastics use kissing, especially in the Song of Songs, to articulate an erotics of reading, the recent explosion of queer romance and fantasy fiction may give us a new way to read (and, who knows, maybe even kiss) with our manifold bodies and desires. Expect Chretien de Troyes, Brnard of Clairvaux, Dante, and lots of queer fiction.