Reading & Composition

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"A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.”

-Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

For this course, we will explore texts that elaborate on motherhood as a multidimensional experience and that challenge the idea of the archetypal mother, a woman who supports and nurtures her children, often at the expense of her individual identity. As we interpret these works, we will consider questions including, but not limited to the following: What does it mean to be a mother? At what cost does one become a mother? What does one lose and what does one gain? How do literary and theoretical texts portray the ways in which a mother negotiates her multiple identities as woman, as partner, as laborer, as mother, as sexual being, as individual? What role does society play in shaping one’s identity as a mother? How do societal expectations work to censor a mother’s articulation of her experience? What kinds of mothers exist other than biological mothers? How do the concepts of “othermothering” and community mothering play into the idea of motherhood in these texts? Can acts of violence and of abandonment also be considered acts of love? How do these texts complicate the archetypal maternal figure?

We will consider a selection of texts, including film, that span across time, geography, and genre. We will read scholarly articles as well as works of literature. 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. 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.