Critical Issues in Literature

The course examines the critical issue of gender and writing. To do this, it reads a selection of literary texts by women writers of different cultural backgrounds, mostly very recent texts but some from the early twentieth-century. The texts are discussed together with a selection of relevant critical and theoretical writings.

The course examines the critical issue of gender and writing. To do this, it reads a selection of literary texts by women writers of different cultural backgrounds, mostly very recent texts but some from the early twentieth-century. The texts are discussed together with a selection of relevant critical and theoretical writings.

The course examines the critical issue of gender and writing. To do this, it reads a selection of literary texts by women writers of different cultural backgrounds, mostly very recent texts but some from the early twentieth-century. The texts are discussed together with a selection of relevant critical and theoretical writings.

The discussion of gender and writing, and the study of women's writing, in particular, has developed substantially since the last quarter of the twentieth century. The theorisation of gender as part of the development of feminist critiques in all humanities and social sciences, and some sciences, has transformed many disciplines, including the discipline of literary studies, in this period; and has led to the establishment of cross-disciplinary women's or gender studies. The analysis of writing and literature in relation to questions of gender enables new interpretations of literary topics, form, and style, of what is written and how; of authorship and readership; of publishing and other institutional questions; and of the connection between literature and culture more widely. The theorisation of gender, and the analysis of gender and literature, leads to exciting connections with other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, linguistics, or history.

An awareness of the centrality of gender and writing to current critical discussion leads to a new apprehension of women's literary texts. The selection of texts studied in the course enables a lively discussion of what women write, and how they write. Topics such as sexual difference, the body and sexuality, cultural difference and identity, and modernity and postmodernity, are among those raised in the course. How literature contributes centrally to current critical debates and critique, including to ideas of how and why literature is important, becomes evident in the study of gender and writing.

Texts: 

Hospital, Janette Turner Due Preparations for the Plague 2003 Novel

Porter, Dorothy El Dorado 2007 Novel