26044 - FEMINIST METHODOLOGY: INTERDISCIPLINARY METHODS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES - METODOLOGIE FEMMINISTE: INTERDISCIPLINARITA' NEGLI STUDI DI GENERE E DELLE DONNE

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

Lo studente sviluppa un'elevata consapevolezza della varietà dei metodi praticati nell'ambito degli studi di genere e delle donne, in una prospettiva interdisciplinare

Contenuti

“Had our education been answerable to theirs, we might have proved as good soldiers and privy councellors, rulers and commanders, navigators and architectors, and as learned as scholars both in arts and sciences, as men are” (Margaret Cavendish, 1662).

Debates on education and canon formation and their interconnection with the rise of feminist literary criticism.

Moving from the debates between second and third wave feminism, the course will investigate some feminist research methods in literary criticism focusing on how feminist and gender studies challenge the major methodologies employed for the interpretation of literary texts written by both men and women. The aim of the course is thus to provide students with critical tools which enable them to re-read women’s access to knowledge and education, the canon formation and the process of exclusion and inclusion of female writers from and within the literary canon and the public sphere. The course will be divided into two parts. The first part will introduce students to the main important methodologies in women’s and gender studies with specific reference to some manifestos of second and third wave feminism(s) and their temporal rhetoric of ‘awakening’ and ‘space’. In particular, it will explore the debates on canon formation and female genealogy and explain the notion of re-vision, resisting reading and situated knowledge. It will also examine the categories of gender, class, ethnicity, race and sexuality and their interconnection. In doing so, the course will stimulate critical thinking and favour the analysis of some emblematic literary texts written by women in different historical moments.

The second part of the course will be devoted to a close-reading of some emblematic literary texts written by women that belong to different literary genres. These texts (and genres) will be explored in order to interrogate how women negotiated their agency in the public sphere, in the print market and in the political, economic and social order. These texts will be also examined in order to discuss the way in which they resist or perpetuate patriarchy, gender inequality and a heterosexual politic of desire and sexuality. But they will also be interrogated to see how they contributed, together with their interpretation and appropriation across time and space, to place the female self within a specific social order, to define the otherness of race and gender, and to establish relations of power between men and women, but also subjects who become geographically, ethnically and culturally distinct.

Testi/Bibliografia

Primary texts:

The Convent of Pleasure, (1668), Margaret Cavendish

Oroonoko, 1688, Aphra Behn (available in the reader)

The Turkish Embassy Letters , 1718-1719, (1769) Lady Wortley Montague (available in the reader)

Jane Eyre, 1849, Charlotte Bronte

Wide Sargasso Sea, 1969, Jean Rhys

Lesson will make reference to the following secondary texts (essays, articles, volumes), and the ones proposed during the course, in accordance with the lecturer:

NB: Bibliography and other information will be provided also during the classes (and then published on the online reading list and program). Students are requested to check the online program also during the course for further notice and information.

Baccolini, Raffaella, Vita Fortunati, M. Giulia Fabi, Rita Monticelli Critiche femministe e teorie letterarie, (a cura di) Bologna, Clueb, 1997. selected essays (available in the library)

Baccolini Raffaella, Le prospettive di genere. Discipline, Soglie, Confini, Bologna, Bononia UP, 2005 (selected essays).

Boer Inge E ., “Despotism from under the veil: Masculine and Feminine Readings of the Despot and the Harem”, in Cultural Critique, 32, 1995-1996, pp. 43-73. (available in the reader)

Ciolkowski, Laura E . “Navigating Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History, English Fiction, and British Empire”, 1997. (available in the reader)

Ferguson, Margaret W . “Juggling the categories of race, class, and gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko”, pp. 209-224, in Hendricks Margo and Patricia Parker (eds.) Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period, London, New York, Routledge, 1994. (available in the reader)

Figlerowicz, Marta , “Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King”: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and the Narration Through Theatre”, New Literary History, 2008, vol. 39, pp.321-334. (available in the reader)

Friedman, Susan Stanford , “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy”, available at: http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/stanford.htm

Gilbert and Gubar , The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1979, the following chapters:

“The Queen's Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity”, pp. 3-44.

“Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authoriship”, 45-92

“A Dialogue of self and Soul: Plain Jane's Progress”, pp. 336-371. (available in the library)

Haraway, Donna “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599. (available in the reader)

Kietzman Mary Jo, “ Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation”, SEL, 38 (1998), pp. 537-551. (available in the reader)

Kolodney, A.:

-“Some Notes on Defining a ‘Feminist Literary Criticism'”, Critical Inquiry n. 2, 1975, pp. 75-92. (available in the reader)

-“Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism”, in E. Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, Virago, London, 1989. (available in the reader)

Lowe Lisa, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalism , Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1991 the following chapters:

“Discourse and Heterogeneity: Situating Orientalism”, pp. 1-29

“Travel Narratives and Orientalism: Montagu and Montesquieu”, pp. 30-74. (available in the reader)

Mohanty Chandra Talpade, “Under Western Eyes Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourse”, in Feminist Review, n 30, 1988, pp. 61-88. (available in the reader)

Monticelli Rita, Ascari Maurizio, Fortunati Vita, (eds.), “Introduction”, Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary, Bologna Patron, 2001.(available in the library)

Pacheco A., “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, n.3, pp. 491- 506. (available in the reader)

Rich, A .:

“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, College English, Vol. 34, No. 1, Women, Writing and Teaching (Oct., 1972), pp. 18-30. (available in the reader)

-----------“Notes towards a politics of location (1984), in Blood, Bread and Poetry. Selected prose 1979-1985, Norton company, London, New York, 1986, pp. 210-231. (available in the reader)

-----------“Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman”, in On lies, secret and silence, Selected Prose 1966-1978, Norton and Company, New York and London, 1979, pp. 89-106.

Showalter, E, “Women and the Literary Curriculum”, College English, Vol. 32, 1971, pp. 855-662

-----------------A Literature of their own: from Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing, Virago, London, 1978. selected chapters.

------------------ “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, Writing and Sexual Difference, (Winter, 1981), pp. 179- 205. (available in the reader)

------------- The female malady: women, madness, and English culture: 1830-1980, London Virago, 1987, selected chapters. (available in the reader)

Spender, Dale, “Women and Literary History”, in The Feminist Reader, eds by Catherine Belsey and J. Moore, Palgrave McMillan 1989, pp. 16-25. (available in the reader)

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty , “Three women's texts and a Critique of Imperialism”, The Feminist reader, eds by Catherine Belsey and J. Moore, Palgrave McMillan 1989, pp. 148-163. (available in the reader)

Walker, Alice “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South” (1974). (available in the reader)

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of one’s Own, 1929, (Compulsory)

Students are requested to analyze 3 primary texts (to be chosen amongst the 5 texts in the Reading list of the primary sources) and articles/essays/chapters from the Reading list of the Secondary sources.

NB. A Room of one’s own by Virginia Woolf is compulsory and is considered as a secondary text.

 

 

Metodi didattici

The course will consist of frontal lessons and seminars,

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

The final oral exam will test the student's knowledge of the methodologies employed and her/his ability to combine theories with the analysis of the primary texts chosen. Students are requested to be able to articulate their thought in English and to have an accurate knowledge of the bibliography chosen for the exam. NB: Students are requested to know the primary texts chosen for the exam in great details.

 

Attendance and class participation will also be assessed as a component of the final overall mark.

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Gilberta Golinelli