ENG 3430: Survey of Women and Literature
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This course introduces students to representative works by and about women of diverse backgrounds. Students will critically examine representations of women in literature, and the mutually constitutive relationship between language, literature, and identity. Assigned readings will cover a multiethnic range of works by women; although we are primarily reading contemporary fiction by North American and British writers, these works explore the diversity of women’s experiences across social, cultural, historical, and geographic differences. Such experiences include girlhood, motherhood, pregnancy, marriage, family, sexuality/sexual desire, friendship, education, work, religion, race, class, age, disability, gender violence, trauma/grief, displacement, and immigration. By the end of this course students should be able to demonstrate understanding of the major critical and thematic concerns in women’s writing; an ability to analyze the feminist politics and implications of women’s writing; and knowledge of the ways in which women writers either resist or reinforce traditional roles and identities through their explorations of language, voice, and genre.
Required Texts*
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