English 185C - Fall, 2012

Women

Class Information

Instructor: McMann, Mindi
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 163 Olson

Description

ENL 185C: Women and the Political

This course will focus on women writing in English during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, we will be focusing on women writers who engage the politics of their time and place in their fiction, but have also addressed race, gender, politics, nationalism, and history in their essays. In reading fiction and non-fiction alongside of each other, this class will investigate how the form of the novel allows certain responses to political and social conditions, and how women writers use other public forums to debate and interrogate their myriad experiences. The class will be comparative in spirit, considering the generic differences between fiction and non-fiction, while charting how women from very different racial, social, and national backgrounds use language to address issues of identity, representation, and experience.

Texts

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston (1975)
Small Island: A Novel, Andrea Levy (2004)
Course Reader
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (1997)