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Instructors: Dr. Wolfgang Funk
Event type:
hybrid: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.522
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: ELC 522
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
In this course, we will look at a variety of literary configurations of gender all of which challenge and destabilise the contemporary discourses and norms of behaviour, propriety and social role of what it meant to be, or perform to be, a woman or man at the time.
After acquainting ourselves with the necessary theoretical framework for talking about ‘gender’ from an analytical perspective, we will, in the first section of the course, look at a variety of literary text from classical antiquity to Shakespeare’s sonnets and from the Bible to 19th-century poetry, which will serve as illustration of both how models of gendered behaviour are constructed as well as undermined.
The main primary texts we will investigate in the second section of the course cover a period from the early 20th century to our present and we will trance different strategies of how reversals, ambiguities or confrontations of traditional gender roles are played out in the realm of literary fiction, always with a view to potential real-life consequences.
Required Reading:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915).
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (2007)
Naomi Alderman, The Power (2016)
If you can get an annotated version of these texts (where available), that would be fantastic. if you already own another version, feel free to use this.
Recommended Background Reading:
Alsop, Rachel, and Annette Fitzsimons. Theorizing Gender. Oxford: Polity Press, 2002.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. New York & London: Routledge, 2006.
Connell, Raewyn, and Rebecca Pearse. Gender: In World Perspective. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.
Schiebinger, Londa. Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993.
Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: The Free Press, 1999.
A preliminary semester plan as well as additional background texts and other helpful material (hopefully including an electronic Semesterapparat) will be made available via LMS either in advance or in the course of the semester. Expect the LMS page for the course to be up and running by early October.
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