Women Writers,Feminist Readers

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

On surface, the academic field of feminist literary/cultural studies would seem to have a paradoxical status: moribund, in theory, but in practice? Thriving. Scholars, students, and everyday readers still avidly seek out and research creative works by women spanning genres, centuries, and platforms. Yet a crucial overhaul of methodologies and terminologies developing over several generations of feminist critical practice has ultimately been key to revitalizing the ways that such readers interpret cultural texts by those who identify as women. Gatekeeping by White, cis women scholars, creative writers, and publishers remains a strong concern, but this field’s decades-long series of conflicts have helped pave the way for key emergent interdisciplinary fields to revamp current approaches to cultural analysis, including critical race and ethnic studies, queer and trans studies, post-colonial studies, disability studies, and working-class studies. Scholars and teachers are revisiting women’s “classics” as well as promoting new ones to take stock and rethink their purpose. This introductory-level course will essentially do just that: explore shifting perceptions of what constitutes “women’s writing” and diverse feminist reception of that writing. This specific focus serves as one revealing in-road to the field’s history, aims, contributions, and problems. After exploring key concepts, issues, and debates, the course will take a two-pronged approach: we’ll read a series of cultural texts that now occupy a central—some might say “canonical”—place in evolving feminist critical archives while simultaneously examining diverse critical/theoretical approaches to each text (a mix of early and more recent work) as a way of charting the field’s development over time and assessing its more recent transformations. Probable authors include Phillis Wheatley, Charlotte Brontë, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Louise Erdrich, Julia Alvarez, Alison Bechdel...