ENGL 223/3.0: Selected Women Writers II

The following is presented for informational purposes only and is subject to change.

Instructor

Dr. Asha Varadharajan Learn more about the instructor...
E-mail: varadhar@queensu.ca
Phone: (613)533-6000 x 74420

Course Description

In A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf wonders, "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? 

This course introduces you to fiction, poetry and drama by twentieth-century and twenty-first century women writers who have sought both to "measure" and to heal the division between poet's heart and woman's body that Woolf so eloquently describes.

First, we will concern ourselves with the global diversity of feminine Anglophone literary traditions across categories of genre, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and geography.  Second, we will explore how women writers adapt and alter masculine literary influences to both scandalous and sobering effect.  Finally, we will consider how literature by women offers a unique and often dissident perspective on the radical social, economic, psychological, scientific and technological, and cultural transformations of the modern and contemporary world.  Throughout the dissemination of this course, pertinent reference will be made to aural, oral, visual and digital cultural production by women as well as to significant moments of collective struggle.

Course Aims and Objectives

While women have a well-established "literature of their own"  (Elaine Showalter's phrase) and no longer need to prove its existence, the continue to defend its value and necessity.  The aim of this course is to explain whether and how a distinct female voice, perspective, and style can be discerned in the astonishing wealth and variety of Anglophone literary traditions and why sexual difference matters in the writing and interpretation of literature.  By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• make relevant links between women writers and their historical and cultural contexts without reducing their writing to autobiography
• understand the feminine literary tradition chronologically as well as geographically
• trace the development of women's writing from the internalization of and resistance to masculine norms to the creation of new forms of female identity that escape the shadow of men
• explain why and how women's writing is an act of defamiliarization, shocking us out of our complacency, making the world and self anew, and doing so through the power of linguistic expression
• write about women in a complex fashion, attending to race, class, sexuality, and culture, and without turning women into heroes or victims
• write well-argued and eloquent essays that demonstrate your unique style and perspective.  While learning about the characteristics that make each writer on the course distinct from her companions, you should be able to refine your own sensibility and find new ways of expressing yourself.  The writers you read may well serve as models for how you write.
• and, if you're lucky, discover thoughts, emotions, perceptions, sensations, facts, dreams and visions you haven't encountered before and all without the aid of vampires!

Course Topics

---

More information:

• Computer Requirements and Internet Access
• Moodle, Our Online Learning Environment 
• Academic Integrity
• Evaluation
• Suggested Time Commitment
• Required Material