“One is not born a woman; one becomes one,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex (1953). In this course we will study the ways in which American and Caribbean women writers have given literary expression to the process by which girls “become” women as well as to attempts to oppose traditional gender definitions and imagine alternative female identities. We will take as our point of departure Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), a novel that has been devoured by generations of girls all over the world–including Beauvoir–and that simultaneously reinforces and resists conventional gender roles. Subsequently we will study a number of novels that pose complex questions about the nature and the representation of personal and collective identity. How is the formation of gender identity, for example, complicated by race and ethnicity in the work of American and Caribbean writers of African and Asian descent? What is the significance of language and family, migration and nation, trauma and memory? What is the relation between genre (especially the female Bildungsroman) and postcolonial thematics? What narrative modes and aesthetic and formal strategies inform these (often autobiographical) fictions of female development? We will read works by a broad range of American and Caribbean women writers as well as a few articles by Judith Butler and other feminist and gender theorists and critics.
Rooster
The timetable will be available from June 1st on the Internet.
Onderwijsvorm
Two-hour seminar per week.
A la carte- en contractonderwijs
Not available as modular course or a la carte.
Leerdoelen
This course aims to develop students’ skills in literary critical analysis through in-depth reading of literary texts. It also aims to extend their understanding of the relationship of these literary texts and their social-historical and cultural contexts. Students will be asked to share analytical views on the assigned texts in class discussion and in a short oral presentation. After some extra training in research skills, students will set up their own research project for the long essay they have to write at the end of the course.
Literatuur
*Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Penguin). *Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Penguin). *Maxine Hong Kingston, _The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts _(Vintage). *Bobbie Anne Mason, In Country (HarperCollins). *Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Bantam). *Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton Critical Edition). *Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (Plume). *Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (Feminist Press). *Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Plume). *Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Anchor).
Toetsing
Oral presentation and participation in class discussion (25 %) and research essay of approximately 4000 words (75 %).
Informatie
English Department, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102c,
Tel. 071-5272144. English@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Blackboard/webpagina
This course is supported by blackboard.
Overzicht
Week 1: Introduction: Alcott (part 1)
Week 2: Alcott (part 2)
Week 3: Wharton_
Week 4: Robinson
Week 5: Robinson
Week 6: Mason
Week 7: Rhys
Week 8: Kincaid
Week 9: Marshall
Week 10: Alvarez
Week 11: Kingston
Week 12: Kingston and Kogawa_
Week 13: Kogawa
Week 14: Conclusions