"Sometimes I think I've found my hero, but it's a queer romance": these are Lorenz Hart's words, sung famously by Ella Fitzgerald, and they embody one of the central paradoxes of romance in both the medieval and the modern senses of the word: that heroism, like love, doesn't necessarily look the way we expect it to, and that some of the pleasure as well as the pathos of reading, and loving, lies in this misrecognition. This course explores the queerness of romance - its proliferation of bodies and desires, its flirting with and thwarting of the scripts for happy heteronormative couplehood, its erotic exuberance - by juxtaposing some of the classics of medieval continental literature with some particularly striking contemporary genre fiction. Expect to read Beroul's Tristan, Chretien de Troyes' Knight of the Cart, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and Heldris of Cornwall's Silence alongside a handful of twenty-first century queer and trans romances. All texts will be read and discussed in English, although students are welcome to engage with Francophone material in the original if they so desire.
3-5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
"Sometimes I think I've found my hero, but it's a queer romance": these are Lorenz Hart's words, sung famously by Ella Fitzgerald, and they embody one of the central paradoxes of romance in both the medieval and the modern senses of the word: that heroism, like love, doesn't necessarily look the way we expect it to, and that some of the pleasure as well as the pathos of reading, and loving, lies in this misrecognition. This course explores the queerness of romance - its proliferation of bodies and desires, its flirting with and thwarting of the scripts for happy heteronormative couplehood, its erotic exuberance - by juxtaposing some of the classics of medieval continental literature with some particularly striking contemporary genre fiction. Expect to read Beroul's Tristan, Chretien de Troyes' Knight of the Cart, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and Heldris of Cornwall's Silence alongside a handful of twenty-first century queer and trans romances. All texts will be read and discussed in English, although students are welcome to engage with Francophone material in the original if they so desire.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.