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Instructors: Dr. Wolfgang Funk
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.522
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: BS/ELC 522
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
We are living at a time where long-established notions of gender and gender roles are being challenged from all sides. On the one hand, #MeToo has become a shorthand for the struggle against entrenched male sexism and structural social inequality between the sexes, thus arguably giving rise to a new form of feminism. On the other hand, conservative and, in some cases, reactionary voices from Donald Trump to the Alternative für Deutschland denounce any discussion about gender as an elitist discourse prompted and kept alive by snowflake liberals with no more urgent problems to solve. Against this background, gender identities seem to be proliferating with traditional demarcations between the sexes becoming ever more blurred and indistinct.
In this course, we will only use such contemporary sites of gender trouble as a point of departure for investigating a very specific literary genre, the feminist utopia. All the texts we will be dealing with use the literary imagination in order to envision alternative gender constellations, often in parallel universes and/or societies set in the future. After discussing the generic conventions of utopias and dystopias (and how these might relate to feminist ideas), we will deal with exemplary texts from the early 20th to the early 21st century (with a short look at a few seminal precursor texts), investigating how the notion of what constitutes a feminist utopia or dystopia has always reflected central issues about social norms, expectations and challenges concerning gender.
Required Reading:
Please purchase your own copy of the following texts:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. 1915
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985
Naomi Alderman, The Power. 2016
+ one or two other texts, which will be made known/available on the JGU Reader
Recommended Background Reading:
Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
Klarer, Mario. Frau und Utopie: Feministische Literaturtheorie und utopischer Diskurs im anglo-amerikanischen Roman. Darmstadt: WBG, 1993.
Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer. Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions. Cambridge: CUP, 2013.
Additional materials as well as a preliminary course outline will be made available via the Reader in due course.
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