2014-2015 academic year

Degree/Study: Degree in Humanities
Year: 3^rd- 4th
Term: 2nd
Number of ECTS credits: 5 credits
Hours of student dedication: 125 hours
Teaching language or languages: English
Teaching Staff: Maria Antònia Oliver  

1. Presentation of the subject

This course has two main aims: (1) To introduce students to some the main concerns or themes of literature written by women in English. (2) To familiarize students with some of the concepts in feminist theory in order for them to apply them to the analysis of literary texts and some films. The texts and films discussed will encompass some of the recurrent topics in women's literature: The difficulty of finding one's own voice as a woman and as a writer in a male literary world, writing about the female body and female desire, maternity, women's experience as cultural and racial others in colonized cultures, and resisting and transforming impulses in women's literature.

By the end of the course students will be able to:

•-          identify some of the main topics in women's literature in English,    

•-          to detect myths and representations of womanhood and women's responses to those myths and representations and to other cultural impulses

•-          demonstrate a familiarity with some basic concepts of feminist theories 

•-          apply those concepts and others to good analytical argument about a text or texts

2. Competences to be attained

General competences

Specific competences

•1.      Instrumental skills Arguing, that is to say, defending or justifying a certain position in written and in speech. Having deductive reasoning skills, that is, reaching a conclusion from a series of premises. Generalising, or extracting a general norm from a limited amount of data or examples. Transmitting, in written and in oral speech, and in a well organised fashion, the acquired knowledge. Analysing and synthesising information taken from a variety of sources. Organising and planning academic work. Using previous knowledge in any learning activity. Applying theory to practice. •2.      Interpersonal skills Group work and meaning negotiation skills. Individual work skills. Integrating group work in the autonomous work. Communicating interpersonally in a small and in a big group. •3.      Systemic skills Creativity. Self-learning and continued learning skills.

•1.      Developing an understanding of how various factors contribute to the differing images of women in literature and demonstrate this understanding through class discussions and the written discourses  required for the course. •2.      Obtaining and displaying a knowledge of various literary terms as they relate selected literature by effectively applying such terms in class discussions and in written discourse. •3.      Assessing the style, theme, properties, and effectiveness of literary works focusing on women, by participating in group discussions, writing a reading journal, and writing analytical papers on selected works. •4.      Contextualizing women's literary works and applying a critical approach to literary pieces in assigned papers. •5.      Knowing some of the most significant theories on women's literature so as to be able to propose sound interpretations of the texts. •6.      Developing an aesthetic appreciation for women's literature by means of individual reading, in-class discussion and written analysis.

3. Contents

UNIT 1.  Engendering language, silence and voice

This unit addresses what it means for a woman to find her own voice both as a woman and as a writer. Virginia Woolf's work A Room of One's Own  will be used to introduce some of the issues later addressed by feminist literary criticism.

  

Works:

Toril Moi, "Feminine, Feminist, Female"

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Works by M. Cavendish, G. Elliot, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson

Virginia Woolf, "The Legacy"

bell hooks, Talking Back

Carol Anne Duffy, "Litany"

Maxine Hong Kingston, "No Name Woman"

Gloria Anzaldúa "How to Tame a Wilde Tongue"

Cisneros, "Loose Woman"

Film: Jane Campion, The Piano

  

UNIT 2.  Writing bodies/ Bodies writing

In this unit we will read Hélène Cixous's essay "The Laugh of the Medussa" and Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" and look at several approaches to the body and desire that women writers have inscribed through the ages: desire unfulfilled, bodies exploited, bodies celebrated, and desire transformed.

 

Works:

Introduction: "Writing Bodies/Bodies Writing"

"The Wife's Lament" (Exeter Book)

Mary Wroth, sonnets.

Jane Barker, "A Virgin Life"

Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Harriet Jacobs, Excerpts from "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

Anne Sexton: poems

Audre Lorde: "Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power"

Djuna Barnes, from "The Ladies Almanac"

Bharati Mukherjee, "A Wife's Story"

Margaret Atwood, "The Female Body"

Margaret Atwood, "This is a Photograph of Me"

Topics addressed in units 1 and 2 will also be looked at in the light of Jean Rhy's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which features the relationship between a mother and a daughter.

  

UNIT 3.  Rethinking the maternal

This unit explores the anger ambivalence, and affirmation with which women have written about motherhood and considers ways in which works written from a mother's

perspective differ from those written from a daughter's. In addition, it discusses essentialist views of mothers, special issues for racial-ethnic mothers, "motherhood as experience and institution," and women's redefinitions of the maternal.

 

Works:

Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood"

Anne Bradstreet (poems)

Adrienne Rich: Excerpt from Of Woman Born

Kate Chopin, "The Awakening"

Tillie Olsen, "Tell Me A Riddle"

Sylvia Plath: "The Disquieting Muses", "Heavy Women", "Childless Women", "Medusa"

Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center"

Gwendolyn Brooks (poems)

Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl"

Moraga, "La Guera"

Moraga, "For the Color of My Mother"

 

UNIT 4.  Resistance and transformation

In this unit we will define resistance literature and links it to ideas and metaphors of transformation, while offering a view of women's literature that challenges patriarcal, racial and class oppression. We will look at some of the earliest manifestations of women's resistance to patriarchy in essays and pamphlets, at the metaphors of resistance in women's literature and at the social and political issues that women have incorporated in their works from an approach that brings together race, class, gender and cultural difference.  The films at the end of the course will be dealt with in the light of the concerns of Third Wave feminism and Women of Color feminism.

 

Works:

"Introduction" (to Unit 4 )

Rachel Speght "A Muzzle for Melastomus"

Mar Astell, "A Serious Proposal"

Mary Wollstonecraft, from "A Vindication..."

Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?"

Anzia Yezierska, "Soap and Water"

Rich, "Notes towards a Politics of Location"

Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"

Tony Morrisson, "Recitatif"

Caryl Churchill, "Top Girls"

Film: Patricia Cardoso, Real Women Have Curves

Gloria Anzaldúa "A Letter to Third World Women Writers"

(optional Helena Viramontes, "The Cariboo Café")

 

 4. Evaluation

Paper proposal: Half-way through the course students will hand in a well-developed proposal for a final paper paper, which will include:  

1. A title

2. An Abstract (A summary of the central idea or thesis of the paper and an explanation of the ways in which relates to the contents of the course

3. A tentative index: A description of how the main argument of the paper will be developed in different sections.

4. An annotated bibliography: A brief description of the contents and an evaluation of the usefulness of the secondary sources that will be used to back up the students' argument.

The proposal is worth 15% of the grade. A good well-developed proposal is a pre-condition for a successful paper.

 

Final paper: All students must write one paper, worth 15% of the grade. Papers with no approved proposal by the instructor will not be accepted. More detailed instructions for this assignment will be given either in class or posted at the Aula Global.

 

Mandatory final exam: Equivalent to 60% of the final mark

 

A participation grade : Equivalent to 10% of the final grade based on students' presentation on a work in class and their general participation throughout the course.

5. Bibliography and Resources

5.1. Basic Bibliography

Coursepack and Aula Global.

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea.  (1966) London: Penguin, 1968.

  

Most, but not all, of the readings in the course packet can be found in:

De Shazer, Mary K, ed. The Longman Anthology of Women's Literature. London: Longman, 2000.

5.2. Additional Bibliography

You are encouraged to explore and supplement the readings offered in the course reader with your own.  You are however not confined to this list, nor are you required to read everything on this list.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. Continuum, 2000, London, New York.

Jackson, Stevi & Jones, Jackie.  Contemporary Feminist Theories. Edinburgh University Press, 1998, UK.

Warhol, Robyn R. & Herndl, Diane Price, ed. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Rutgers University Press, 1997, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Eagleton, Mary, ed.  Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Basil Blackwell, 1986, UK.

Humm, Maggie, ed. Feminisms, A Reader. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, London.

Belsey, Catherine and Moore, Jane, ed. The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism. Basil Blackwell, 1989, New York.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, ed. Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism A Norton Reader. Norton, 2007, New York & London

Marks, Elaine and Courtivron, Isabelle de, ed. & introd. New French Feminisms An Anthology. Schocken Books, 1981, New York

Oliver, Kelly and Walsh, Lisa. Contemporary French Feminism. Oxford University Press, 2004, UK

Gibert, Sandra M. & Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 2000, New Haven & London.

Spender, Dale.  Man Made Language. Pandora Press, 1990, Canada.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. Routledge, 1985, London & New York.

Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. University of Illinois Press, 2000, Chicago.  

Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radial Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Basic Books, 2000, NY.

Nicholson, J. Linda ed.  Feminism/ Postmodernism. Routledge, 1990, NY.

Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Harvard University Press, 1989, Cambridge Mass.

Moraga, Cherrie & Anzaldua, Gloria eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour. Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983, Latham, NY.

Hooks, Bell.  Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. South End Press, 2000, MA.

 Hooks, Bell.  Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1999, MA.

 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Russo, Ann & Torres, Lourdes eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.  Indiana University Press, 1991, Bloomington.  

6. Methodology  

This course is taught in English and follows a communicative methodology that places emphasis on reading comprehension, listening and writing. Classes are entirely in English. Students are expected to write exams and papers in English.  

The approach to the course, though based mainly on texts, will also consider cinema as a way of narrating or telling a story.

7. Tentative Course Schedule

GENDER STUDIES: WOMEN'S LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

(This schedule may be subject to changes)

 

WEEK: 8/01

Introduction: Course mechanics, Key terms: Feminine, Feminist, Female

Introduction to Unit 1: Silence, language, voice

Homework: Toril Moi, "Feminine, Feminist, Female". Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Works by M. Cavendish, G. Elliot, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson.

 

WEEK: 13/1 - 15/1

Tuesday: UNIT 1: ENGENDERING SILENCE, LANGUAGE AND VOICE

Discussion of Woolf,  Moi, Cavendish, E. Brontë and Elliot, Emily Dickinson "Tell the Truth"

Homework:

Virginia Woolf, "The Legacy"; bell hooks, Talking Back; Carol Anne Duffy, "Litany

  

Thursday: UNIT 1 CONTINUED

Further discussion of Woolf's A Room, Woolf's "The Legacy", Discussion of hooks

Duffy "Litany"

Homework: Review the readings done so far, Maxine Hong Kingston, "No Name Woman", Gloria Anzaldúa "How to Tame a Wilde Tongue", Cisneros, "Loose Woman", Read film reviews and essay on film

  

WEEK: 20/1- 22/1

Tuesday: UNIT 1 CONTINUED

Maxine Hong Kingston, "No Name Woman", Anzaldúa, "How to Tame a Wilde Tongue", Sandra Cisneros, "Loose Woman", Screening of Jane Campion's The Piano

Homework:

Introduction: "Writing Bodies/Bodies Writing", "The Wife's Lament" (Exeter Book)

  

Thursday:

UNIT 1 CONTINUED

The Piano discussed

UNIT 2: WRITING BODIES, BODIES WRITING

Introduction: "Writing Bodies/Bodies Writing", "The Wife's Lament"

Homework:

Mary Wroth, sonnets; Jane Barker, "A Virgin Life," Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

 

WEEK: 27/1- 28/1

Tuesday: UNIT 2: CONTINUED

Mary Wroth, "Sonnets"; Jane Barker, "A Virgin Life"; Cixous Hélène, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Homework: Harriet Jacobs, Excerpts from "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

  

Thursday: UNIT 2: CONTINUED. Lecture by invited speaker. Jacobs discussed. Homework: Anne Sexton: poems, Audre Lorde: "Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power", Djuna Barnes, from "The Ladies Almanac", Bharati Mukherjee, "A Wife's Story"; Margaret Atwood, "The Female Body"; Margaret Atwood, "This is a Photograph of Me"

  

WEEK: 3/2- 5/2

Tuesday: UNIT 2: CONTINUED

Anne Sexton: poems; Audre Lorde: "Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power"

Djuna Barnes, from "The Ladies Almanac," Bharati Mukherjee, "A Wife's Story"

Margaret Atwood, "The Female Body";M argaret Atwood, "This is a Photograph of Me"

Homework:  Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Thursday: UNIT 2: CONTINUED

Djuna Barnes, from "The Ladies Almanac"; Bharati Mukherjee, "A Wife's Story"; Margaret Atwood, "The Female Body"; Margaret Atwood, "This is a Photograph of Me"

TOPICS IN UNIT 1 AND 2 AND INTRODUCTION TO TOPICS IN UNIT 3:

Novel: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

 

WEEK: 10/2 - 12/2

Tuesday: Novel: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Homework: Finish reading the novel if you haven't.

 

Thursday: Novel:  WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Film (if time)

Homework:

Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood"

Anne Bradstreet (poems)

 

WEEK: 17/2- 19/2

Tuesday: Discussion of film

UNIT 3: RETHINKING THE MATERNAL

Introduction: Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood"

Anne Bradstreet (poems)

Homework:

Adrienne Rich: Excerpt from Of Woman Born; Kate Chopin, "The Awakening": Tillie Olsen, "Tell Me A Riddle"

HAND IN ASSIGNMENT 1: DEVELOPED PAPER PROPOSAL (3 TO 5 PAGES), 15% OF YOUR GRADE

  

Thursday:

UNIT 3 CONTINUED

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born; Kate Chopin; Tillie Olsen

Homework:

Sylvia Plath: "The Disquieting Muses", "Heavy Women", "Childless Women", "Medusa"; Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center"; Gwendolyn Brooks (poems); Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl"

 

WEEK: 24/2- 26/2

Tuesday:

UNIT 3 CONTINUED: Sylvia Plath: "The Disquieting Muses", "Heavy Women", "Childless Women", "Medusa"; Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center"; Gwendolyn Brooks (poems); Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl"

Homework:

Moraga, "La Guera"; Moraga, "For the Color of My Mother"; "Introduction" (Unit 4)

Rachel Spelght "A Muzzle for Melastomus"; Mary Astell, "A Serious Proposal"

 

Thursday:

UNIT 3 CONTINUED: Moraga, "La Guera"; Moraga, "For the Color of My Mother"

UNIT 4: RESISTANCE AND TRANSFORMATION

"Introduction"; Rachel Speght "A Muzzle for Melastomus"; Mary Astell, "A Serious Proposal"

Homework:

Mary Wollstonecraft, from "A Vindication..."; Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?";

Anzia Yezierska, "Soap and Water."

  

WEEK: 3/3 - 5/3

Tuesday:

UNIT 4 CONTINUED

Mary Woolstonecraft; Sojourner Truth; Anzia Yezierska, "Soap and Water."

Homework:

Rich, "Notes towards a Politics of Location"; "Diving into the Wreck"; Tony Morrisson, "Recitatif"

 

Thursday:

Rich, "Notes towards a Politics of Location"; Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"; Tony Morrisson, "Recitatif"

Homework: Caryl Churchill, "Top Girls"

  

WEEK: 10/3-12/3

Tuesday: Caryl Churchill, "Top Girls"

  

Thursday: Film: Real Women Have Curves

Homework: Gloria Anzaldúa "A Letter to Third World Women Writers"

(optional Helena Viramontes, "The Cariboo Café")

 

WEEK: 17/3

Tuesday: Film: Real Women Have Curves

(discussion)

Gloria Anzaldúa "A Letter to Third World Women Writers"

 

HAND IN ASSIGNMENT 2: FINAL PAPER FOLLOWING GUIDELINES AND INSTRUCTORS' COMMENTS ON ASSIGNMENT 1 

•7.      Language, performance, participation and attendance.

 Before you register for this course please consider the following requirements:

1. It is essential that the students enrolled in the course have a good command of English and have achieved at least level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages​​.

2. This is a course that emphasizes students' analytical, critical reading. It is important that they read and prepare all the texts in the course well in advance, given the complexity and length that they may have sometimes. This is an important requirement if you are taking this course since it is a course that places a lot of emphasis on reading thoroughly and analytically.

3. Students are expected to participate actively in discussions and to prepare a brief analysis of a text of their choice. The elements of participation in this course are the usual ones: attendance, reading, staying awake, respect for the class, and participation in discussions. Keep in mind that you want to make your discussion participation productive; talking for the sake of talking is neither necessary nor helpful.

4. Attendance is necessary to follow the pace of the course and the in-class discussion and analysis of works. Students who for some reason are not able to attend class should keep themselves updated on what has been done in class either by asking their classmates, looking at Aula Global or going to the instructor's office hours. The instructor will not answer emails concerning the mechanics of the course or the course content.

9. Exams and deadlines

Make-up exams: No make-up exams will be given unless in very exceptional cases such as overlapping with other exams or serious and well-justified medical conditions. There will be no make-up exams for students who are travelling during the exam period.

Deadline extensions will only be given in very exceptional cases. Travel is not a reason to extend a deadline. Please check the exam-date periods and deadlines before you make travel plans.