Madwomen and Marriages: Introduction to Women’s Literature (Fall)
Is there a woman in this text? If you look closer, she might turn out to be dead (Caroline Frankenstein), mad (Ophelia), too powerless to matter much (Phoebe Caulfield), obsessively vengeful (Abigail Williams) or just plain missing. So, what does all this mean? Explore the answers to this and other questions as we explore a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary selection of texts to investigate how female characters voice their experiences and respond to the societal constraints imposed on them. We will evaluate the critical observation of the so-called sentimentality of women’s literature, with plots that culminate in a marriage or a death–or both. After a brief introduction to feminist criticism, we will consider such questions as: What is women’s writing? How do we evaluate it? Do “women’s texts” differ from men’s in content or form or both or neither? These questions will help to inform our analysis of a dizzying variety of plots in which will encounter brides, madwomen, heroines, and other women tackling domesticity, the war between the sexes, and issues of autonomy, among other concerns.
Reading list:
Summer reading: Kate Chopin, The Awakening and selections from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Virginia Woolf, selections from A Room of One’s Own
Selected writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, including “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
Selected poetry, prose, and drama by Sharon Olds, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Susan Glaspell, Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Faulkner, Nellie Wong, Alaide Foppa, Alice Munro, Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy, and others.
Bondage and Freedom (Fall)
Hiding in an attic! Posing as a nanny! Dressing as a man! The harrowing tales of abuse and escape in slave narratives titillated Northern readers while enlisting their sympathies for the abolitionist cause. At the same time, the genre posed a wealth of problems to the freedman or woman telling the tale. Should she write it herself or dictate it to a sympathetic white author? How would he depict his subjugation while simultaneously claiming his manhood? How could she capture her readers’ sympathy rather than their contempt when describing sexual abuse? How could he maintain control of his story when well-meaning abolitionists had a different agenda? These questions have proven so compelling that, 150 years after emancipation, authors are still writing slave narratives. In addition to the real narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, we will explore neo-slave narratives, including both realistic tales of escape and novels that blend genres, mixing verisimilitude with ghost stories and science fiction. Whether realistic or fantastic, classic slave narrative or neo, all the books in this course share the same fundamental concern: how to be a person in a world that claims you are a thing.
Reading List:
Summer reading: Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Live of a Slave Girl
Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Contemporary American Drama (Spring)
In your previous English courses, you’ve studied some of the great dramas of Western literature, including classical and Shakespearean texts. How has this genre evolved in the 21st century? Who are some of the major names in American theater? What themes and trends characterize recent drama? How do playwrights explore issues of class, race, and gender? Is the “American Dream” still a focus? We will explore these and other questions as we study a number of representative works. Meet iconic characters such as Blanche DuBois, who always depends on “the kindness of strangers”; Dr. Vivian Bearing, an expert on John Donne; and Father Flynn, who may be guilty of a terrible crime—or just the victim of the malevolence of Sr. Aloysius. When possible, we will examine filmed versions of these plays to see what choices directors made in taking them from the page to the stage or camera. The course will also have a creative component as you will perform scenes from course texts as well as compose and present original works.
Reading list:
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Margaret Edson, Wit (1999)
David Auburn, Proof (2001)
John Patrick Shanley, Doubt (2005)
Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (2008)
Other texts by authors possibly including August Wilson, John Guare, Neil Simon, Sarah Jones, Sarah Ruhl, etc.
Ghosts in the Attic (Spring)
We all enjoy telling ghost stories around the campfire or reading a guilty pleasure like Steven King and then crawling into bed with the light on, too scared to sleep. Did you know that Jane Austen’s heroines enjoyed scary stories as much as we do? With its madwomen, ghosts, monsters, imprisoned wives, and evil men, gothic literature has scared readers for over 200 years. At the same time, though, it has tackled such significant issues as the social position of women, the nature of the unconscious, and the dangers of science. We’ll enjoy a century’s worth of terror, exploring the social and philosophical questions raised by what was, for its original readers, a guilty pleasure. We’ll also view some film versions of the stories that have captivated generations of readers. Good luck falling asleep!
Reading List:
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein
Bram Stoker, Dracula
A few short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allan Poe. (Yellow Wallpaper—The Gold-Bug and Other Tales).