Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

Ambiguous Amities: Literary and Cultural Representations of Female Friendships
Course Number: 
R1A.003
Course Catalog Number: 
21470
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Erin Bennett, Hannah Katznelson
Days: 
Tu / Th
Time: 
12:30-2
Semester: 
Location: 
70 Evans

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love,” writes Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Implicit within this quote is the connection (or conflict) between friendship and romance. Tellingly, in several of Austen’s novels a significant shift takes place when a woman gets married; her best-friendship loses its relevance and her marriage takes centerstage. What does this say, Austen’s novels ask, about the (de)value of female friendships in a patriarchal world? Why does the marriage plot take precedence over friendship? How do platonic and romantic relationships come into conflict? This tension isn’t confined to the eighteenth century; in the 2011 film Bridesmaids, a marriage proposal causes a rift in the friendship between two women, demonstrating the longevity of this imposed incompatibility between friendship and romance. Not only do romantic relationships interrupt friendships between women, but identity politics and traumatic experiences shape them as well. In this course, we will explore how texts represent friendship between women, its trials and its gifts. We will ask questions such as, how do class, race, gender, sexual identity, trauma come into play in the formation--and sometimes deterioration--of friendships between women? How do literary works uphold or challenge patriarchal notions of female friendships? What happens when platonic feelings turn into romantic feelings between women? Importantly, how does forgiveness operate between women in these texts? Can these texts help us imagine an alternative structure of female friendship that transcends patriarchal limitations and impositions?

In order to pursue these questions, we will consider a selection of texts that span across time, geography, and genre. We will read scholarly articles as well as works of literature in order to introduce you to the field of literary criticism. As this is a Reading and Composition course, one of our primary goals will be to build and to refine your ability to construct a cogent analytical argument about a literary text and to support your argument using textual evidence and scholarly material. You will write around 36 pages that will consist of various formal writing assignments throughout the semester. You will read around 50-75 pages of literary and scholarly texts per week.

Possible course texts: Morrison, Toni – Sula; Ferrante, Elena – My Brilliant Friend; Jane Austen – Emma; Nella Larsen – Passing; Feig, Paul – Bridesmaids; Szabó, Magda – The Door; Woolf, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own; Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God; Atwood, Margaret – Cat’s Eye; Packer, Z.Z. – “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere;” Lawrence, D. H. – Women in Love; Scott, Ridley – Thelma & Louise; Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Padmarag; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Catherine Hardwicke, Thirteen