Female Gazes: Woolf, Spark, Carter 3301-ZJ-LK001
This course aims to enhance students' understanding of the works of the three key 20th century British women writers, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, and Angela Carter, in the context of feminism. The course takes as its theoretical basis the perspective of gynocriticism proposed by Elaine Showalter: a feminist critique that focuses on the study of women's writing as a distinct perception of reality, without attempting to make it dependent on the canon of literature produced by men.
The course begins with the analysis of Virginia Woolf's works (both her literary fictions and her program essays). This will help the students to understand the aesthetics of the everyday fundamental to women's writing, and to critically examine such concepts as gender fluidity and creative independence.
A study of a text by Muriel Spark will reveal female subjectivity at its most profound, in its most vivid and dangerous form: as the subjectivity of the autonomous creative mind, asserting the power of imagination over reality and well capable of keeping its own secrets.
Angela Carter's short stories from the collection The Bloody Chamber will allow the students to see the connections between female sensuality on the one hand and imagination and art on the other. Reading Carter through Nancy K. Miller's arachnological perspective, the students will be able to recognize in her language traces of unique feminine consciousness, because a woman writer is herself the work she fashions.
Type of course
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
Knowledge
Students will have in-depth familiarity with:
K_W06: selected dilemmas and issues of contemporary civilization such as feminism, critical approaches in literary studies.
Abilities
Students will be able to:
- K_U06: Apply knowledge pertinent to feminist literary studies and narrative theories
- K_U08: plan and organize individual and team work in order to achieve desired objectives effectively
Social competences
Students will be ready to:
- K_K01: critically appraise their knowledge and content obtained from various sources
Assessment criteria
- attendance (5%)
- participation in discussions, mini-presentations by students (25%)
- final test (70%)
2 absences are allowed.
Bibliography
Elaine Showalter, “Towards A Feminist Poetics” in: Newton K.M. (eds) Twentieth-Century Literary Theory (London: Palgrave, 1997)
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Woman Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Elaine Showalter, ed. Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (London: Virago, 1985)
Nancy K. Miller, “The Woman, The Text and The Critic” in: The Poetics of Gender, ed. by Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 270-95
Judy Little, Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark and Feminism (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983)
Jane Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981)
Alex Zwerdling, “Anger and Conciliation in Woolf's Feminism”, Representations 3 (1983), pp. 68-89
Anne Fernald, “A Room of One's Own, Personal Criticism, and the Essay”, Twentieth Century Literature 40.2 (1994), pp. 165-189
Susan Sniader Lanser, “Fictions of Absence: Feminism, Modernism, Virginia Woolf” in: Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 102-119
Alan Bold, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision (London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984)
David Herman, ed., Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
Peter Childs, “Angela Carter: The Demythologizing Business” in: Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 103-125
Heta Pyrhönen, “Imagining the impossible: the erotic poetics of Angela Carter's ‘Bluebeard’ stories”, Textual Practice 21:1 (2007), pp. 93-111
Mary S. Pollock, “Angela Carter's animal tales: Constructing the non-human”, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 11:1 (2000), pp. 35-57
Anna Watz, Angela Carter and Surrealism: “a Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic” (Taylor & Francis, 2016)
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: