Overview
While women have a well-established "literature of their own” (Elaine Showalter’s phrase) and no longer need to prove its existence, they continue to defend its value and necessity. The aim of this course is to explain whether and how a distinct female voice, perspective, and style can be discerned in the astonishing wealth and variety of Anglophone literary traditions and why sexual difference matters in the writing and interpretation of literature.
In A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf wonders, "Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" This course introduces you to fiction, poetry, and drama by twentieth-century and twenty-first century women writers who have sought both to "measure" and to heal the division between poet's heart and woman's body that Woolf so eloquently describes. First, we will concern ourselves with the global diversity of feminine Anglophone literary traditions across categories of genre, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and geography. Second, we will explore how women writers adapt and alter masculine literary influences to both scandalous and sobering effect. Finally, we will consider how literature by women offers a unique and often dissident perspective on the radical social, economic, psychological, scientific and technological, and cultural transformations of the modern and contemporary world. Throughout the dissemination of this course, pertinent reference will be made to aural, oral, visual, and digital cultural production by women as well as to significant moments of collective struggle.
Learning Outcomes
- Describe the impact of 20th and 21st Century women writers on the development of the Anglophone literary canon.
- Discuss the features of feminine literary traditions across cultures, geographies, and histories, noting both what is unique and what is common to those traditions.
- Explain how women writers respond to their historical, social, and cultural contexts and, in turn, evaluate the influence of such contexts within their work.
- Investigate the acts of acknowledgement, resistance, and defamiliarization through which women writers (re)write the masculine literary canon and re-invent feminine identities.
- Analyze the relationship between form and content in works by women writers through the literary interpretation of poetry, prose, and drama – addressing the use of tropes, genres, style, and voice to communicate themes.
- Apply frameworks and concepts drawn from a selection of feminist literary theory to enhance critical essays on the interpretation of texts by women writers.
- Demonstrate a capacity for sustained and logical argument that builds on textual evidence and manifests itself in a variety of written forms (e.g. close reading, analytical essay, etc.).
- Apply critical thinking skills to a variety of written forms including peers’ responses to reflect and evaluate information being presented.
- Demonstrate effective writing skills, including clear and grammatical sentences, unified and coherent paragraphs, and a tone and vocabulary that are appropriate to the writer’s goals.