SYLLABUS
Women’s Rights, Representations & RelationsCOURSE DESCRIPTION:
For the spring session, we will resume our investigation of the alarming political ironies, rivalling justice duties, violent group psychology, and misappropriated personal histories during the Reign of Terror, as ruthlessly satirised and, at the same time, sensitively humanised by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. No less integral to our ongoing study is the exploration of gender politics – its inversion, its convention, an its representation – in the historical novel. Crucially, it will help us segue into a more sustained reflection on the nexus between women’s agency (social, political, and creative, among others), female representations and “representationality” in literature, and their fluid, oft-frustrated position in social relations. To this end, Sophocles’ Antigone shall be our point of departure, as we consider the fraught dynamics between patriarchal regime, sibling love, female self-assertion, and right of resistance. Indeed, what were the traditional rights of women, what rights were they denied, and to what extent has literature contributed to the perpetuation – and subversion – of entrenched patriarchal values and abuses? In an attempt to address these questions, we will look closely at the sisterhood of witches, the partnership between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and the lack thereof between Macduff and Lady Macduff in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As a much-needed counterpoise in gender perspective, the spring session will conclude with Sylvia Plath’s ireful, anxiety-ridden poetry and Chapter 4 of Virginia Woolf’s interbellum essay, A Room of One’s Own. (To ensure positive learning outcomes, the students will be asked to submit either an expository essay on Dickens’s novel or a synthesis essay on the two plays.)
PRIMARY READING TEXTS:
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Ed. with intro. by Andrew Sanders. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ed. Nicholas Brooke. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra. Trans. H. D. F. Kitto. Ed. with intro. by Edith Hall. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Trillling, Lionel and Harold Bloom, eds. Victorian Prose and Poetry. New York, London, and Toronto: OUP, 1973.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Ed. with intro. by Morag Shiach. Oxford: OUP, 1998.