A survey of contemporary fiction by male writers who portray love as a queer emotion. Much current popular culture tends to see love as essentially normal: unlike sex, which by its very nature is liable to become kinky or perverse, love is usually represented as being at the heart of normal life, at home in conventional social structures (such as marriage and the nuclear family). One of love’s most important social functions nowadays is to endow accepted forms of personal life with a look and feel of intrinsic normality. But what if love proved to be weirder than sex? This course will examine literary works that offer other models of love, models that disrupt, alter, refuse, or reinvent the normal practice of normal love. These non-standard kinds of love can be considered queer, not because they spring from homosexual desire (though many of the works studied will deal with gay male love), but because they are at odds with widely accepted practices and ideals of love. Queer love, according to this definition, is love that takes an unexpected or deviant form, that appears in unconventional contexts, that produces a shocking or scandalous outcome, that expresses itself in unacceptable ways, or that simply impels the lover to depart from feelings, social arrangements, or styles of life deemed to be normal. What kinds of queer thinking, and what queer modes of being and relating, might the concept of love promote? What is the relation between (queer) love and (non-standard) literary form? The ultimate aim of this course is to explore how well love and society actually go together.