ENGL 190-02, Contemporary Women Writers, Spring 2015

Abstract

This course is expands the scope of conventional literary study to incorporate the voices of contemporary women writers, many of them writers of color—certainly a worthwhile objective. Yet the course title itself prompts a series of questions. Why study literature exclusively by women? Is there an elusive female voice that can be isolated and evaluated as representative of “women’s experience”? Is the experience of women that uniform? In this class, we will do our best to be mindful of these questions, attempting to analyze these works for how they represent the cultures about which and within which they were written but also being careful not to assume that these works tell the entire story about a culture or the female experience. Our primary focus will be works of contemporary literature written in the United States that address the experience of kinship—intimate and family relations that shape who we are and how we interact with the world. This emphasis will allow us to explore the ways familial relations complicate clear distinctions between private and public, self and other, social and political, history and the imagination (to paraphrase literary scholar David Palumbo-Liu). We will consider the ways kinship relationships activate feelings of belonging and exclusion, and how those relationships map onto larger cultural and national identities.