Gender and the Modernist Self

Are women more modern than men? In the early decades of the twentieth century it may have seemed so, for in these years the figure of woman came to stand as emblematic for modernity itself. In this course, we will read the literature of the turn-of-the-century (including Ibsen's A Doll's House , Grant Allen's The Typewriter Girl , Freud's Dora , Woolf's A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse ) alongside the sociology, psychology, and philosophy from the same period to see how exaggerated portraits of hyper-modern women came to seem descriptive of a new, twentieth-century version of selfhood. Enrollment limited to 20.