Annotation
This course deals with gender approaches to the study of literature. It explores the ways in which critical and in-depth reading of literary works can be approached using gender as an analytical tool, but it also goes beyond the texts themselves and addresses both male and female literary traditions. It also deals with the impact of feminism on literary studies. Themes:
1. Key aspect of gender conception – essencialism and social constructivism
2. Overview of western tradition of gender conception
3. Key figures of gender-oriented 20th-century literature: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir
4. Cultural constructions of women
5. Language and gender
6. Feminist literary criticism
7. Revision of female literature: Adrienne Rich and obligatory heterosexuality
8. Sylvia Plath and resistence to patriarchal power
9. Alice Walker and revision of the work of Virginie Woolf
10. Womanism versus feminism