Writing Gender/Genre et écriture

This seminar aims at stimulating new readings of American literature through the lens of theories that have developed in the field of gender and women’s studies over the last decades. The students will be introduced to a wide array of critical perspectives, ranging from early advocates of gynocriticism and theoreticians of écriture féminine to champions of intersectionality, queer studies, masculinity studies, and ecofeminism. Special attention will be paid to the development of Black and Chicana feminist discourse and to their contribution to gender politics. Such key concepts as revision, mestizaje, silence, queering, performance, empowerment, resistance, embodiment, margin and center will be used to foster a revaluation of certain canonical or lesser-known texts and, sometimes, to uncover hidden layers of meaning beneath more conventional readings.

The literary texts included will be drawn from different periods and from a variety of genres (novel, short fiction, poetry). Extracts from works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Carmen Tafolla, Paula Gunn Allen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many more will be analysed and discussed in class but the students are also invited to offer reading suggestions of their own if they wish to do so.

This seminar will be conducted in French and in English.

The final grade for regular students (régime assidu) will be based upon class participation (20% of the grade), oral presentations and/or written assignments (depending on the number of students in this seminar) throughout the semester (80% of the grade).

Students who benefit from régime spécial and cannot attend the seminar for various reasons must hand in their home assignments (50% of the grade) by the end of the semester before sitting for an oral exam (50% of the grade) in early January.

Feel free to ask me questions by sending an email to stephanie.durrans @ u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr (stephanie.durrans @ u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr)

All the students who have signed up for this seminar must contact me by email in early September to register on my mailing list.

Ouvert aux étudiant·es en mobilité sous réserve du nombre de places disponibles. 

• Adams, Rachel and David Savran, eds. The Masculinity Studies Reader.   Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
• BELSEY, Catherine & MOORE, Jane, ed. The Feminist Reader, Essays on Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997.
• BUTLER, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• CARBY, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
• CASTILLO, Debra A. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992.
• CHO, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw & Leslie Mccall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” in Signs, 2013, Vol.38 (4), pp. 785-810.
• Cixous, Hélène. « Le Rire de la Méduse », in Simone de Beauvoir et la lutte des femmes, L’Arc, 61, mai 1975.
• Diamond, Irene & Gloria Feman Orestein. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
• Donovan Josephine. “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” in Signs 15 (2): 350-375.
• EAGLETON, Mary, ed. Feminist Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, reprt. 1996
• Gilbert, Sandra M. & Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
• ---. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.
• Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991.
• HEDGES, Elaine & FISHER FISHKIN, Shelley. Listening to Silences, New Essays in Feminist Criticism, New Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974.
• Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine,” in Feminist Studies, 7, 2, Summer, 247-63.
• Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” in Feminist Studies, 6, 1, 1980, 1-25.
• ---. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1603-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.
• Kristeva, Julia. La Révolution du langage poétique. Paris : Seuil, 1974.
• ---. Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
• ---. “Women’s Time”, Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs, 1 October 1981, Vol.7 (1), pp. 13-35.
• LE TALEC, Jean-Yves. « Des Men’s Studies aux Masculinity Studies : du patriarcat à la pluralité des masculinités », SociologieS [En ligne], Dossiers, Sociétés en mouvement, sociologie en changement, mis en ligne le 07 mars 2016. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/5234
• Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday. Reprinted (1977). London: The Women’s Press, 1976.
• PRICE Janet and Margrit Shildrick. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• RICH, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978. Reprinted (1980). London: Virago, 1979.
• ---. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, London: W. W. Norton & Co, 1995
• Shapiro, Eve. Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age. Routledge: 2010.
• Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1977.
• ---. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in Writing and Sexual Difference (ed. Elizabeth ABEL), U of Chicago P, 1982.
• ---. “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women (ed. Mary JACOBUS), London: Croom Helm, 1979.
• ---. Sister's Choice. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
• SHOWALTER, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism, Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. London: Virago Press, 1986.
• Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1974.
• Sturgeon, Noël. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• WALKER, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Womanist Prose. London: The Women's Press Ltd., 1984, rprt. 1995
• Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Granada, 1977 [1929].