ENGL 7800: Feminist Approaches to Literature
Spring, 2010
Dr. Paula R. Backscheider
9082 Haley Center
pkrb@auburn.edu
(334) 844-9091
Office Hours:
Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the Use. –Wittgenstein
We must endlessly complicate before we can understand a thing in all its simplicity. –Geertz
Required Texts:
Syllabus:
Jan. 12: Orientation. Eliza Haywood, Fantomina*
Recovering, Editing, and Reinterpreting Women’s Lives and Texts
19: Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing; Toril Moi, Chapters 1 and 2 of Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 37-92.
26: Eliza Haywood, The City Jilt and The Rash Resolve*; Kathryn King, “Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Tactical Use of Print and Manuscript”**in Justice and Tinker,eds. Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas; Devoney Looser, “Jane Porter and the Old Woman Writer’s Quest for Finiancial Independence”*; Earla Wilputte, “Harridans and Heroes: Female Revenge and the Masculine Duel in Jane Barker, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood,”* Eighteenth-Century Women 4 (2006): 27-51.
Feb. 2: Visit by Professor Kathryn King. Kathryn King, “New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719-1725"** in Backscheider and Ingrassia, eds. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture: Eliza Haywood, The Invisible Spy and other readings selected by Dr. King.
9: Annette Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts.”* Reports on reception histories. Edited texts and reception histories due.
Persistent Issues
Please be prepared in each seminar to apply theoretical readings to the Haywood texts you have read
16: Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy,”+ Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995), Susan Lanser, “Sapphic Picaresque, Sexual Difference and the Challenges of Homo-adventuring”*; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Note on the `Political Economy’ of Sex”*; Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman”*; Eliza Haywood, The British Recluse** in Backscheider and Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730.
23: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”+; Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks”*; Kenneth MacKinnon, chapters 4 and 6 from Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator*; Rudolf Arnheim, “Centers as Hubs”*: and Nancy Miller, “Performances of the Gaze” from Subject to Change**
Major Methods
March 2: Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Susan Gubar, “`The Blank Page’ and the Issue of Female Creativity,”* Critical Inquiry (1981): 243-64;” Julie Crawford, “The Case of Lady Anne Clifford; or, Did women Have a Mixed Monarchy”* in PMLA, 121 (2006): 1682-89; Anne Balsam and Paula A. Treichler, “Feminist Critical Studies: Questions for the 1990s,”+ Women and Language 13:1 (1990).
9: Continued discussion. Book reviews due.
SPRING BREAK - ENJOY
23: Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”*; Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity”* from Unbearable Weight; Teresa de Lauretis, “The Technology of Gender.”*
30: Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir (selections) and “`I am not a woman writer’ About women, literature, and feminist theory today,”* Feminist Theory 9 (2008): 259-271.
April 1: Toril Moi Lecture “The Body in Feminist Theory: Wittgensteinian Perspectives,” Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium, 3:00 p.m.
2: Special Seminar with Dr. Moi; 2:00 p.m. HC 2206; “Meaning What We Say: The ‘Politics of Theory’ and the Responsibility of Intellectuals”* in The Philosophical Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004): 139-160;“‘I Am Not a Feminist, But…’ How Feminism Became the F-word”* PMLA 121:5 (Oct. 2006): 1735-41;“‘I Am Not A Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today”* Feminist Theory 9:3 (2008): 259-271; “What Can Literature Do? Simone de Beauvoir as a Literary Theorist”* PMLA 124:1 (January 2009): 189-98.
6: Eliza Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless and applications of methodologies to it.
13: Application of methodologies to Betsy Thoughtless.
20: Cheryl Nixon, “`Stop a Moment at This Preface’: The Gendered Paratexts of Fielding, Barker, and Haywood,”* Journal of Narrative Theory 32 (2002): 123-53; Valerie Rumbold, “Rank, Community, and Audience: The Social Range of Women’s Poetry*” in Women’s Poetry: 1660-1750: 121-39; Carol Watts, “Releasing Possibility into Form: Cultural Choice and the Woman Writer,”** New Feminist Discourses: 83-102.27: Readings from “Feminist Criticism Today,” special section of PMLA 121 (2006): essays by Elliott, Henry, Marcus, and Moi*.
Papers Due: May 7 at 3:00 p.m.
* On Blackboard
** On reserve in the library
+ Available full-text through library databases