Reading & Composition

“Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day.”

—Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound”

This course is about literary representations of women who are “out of control”—women cast as melodramatic, hysterical, perverse, polluted, violent, and excessive. As a class, we will re-think what we think we know about these women, asking how and why they have been represented as social outcasts. Under what circumstances are women represented as mad? In what ways have literary women reacted to being “put in their place”? How have writers portrayed these same women as acceptable, and even exemplary?

In order to approach these questions, we will examine problematic/dated texts as well as feminist re-imaginings. Rather than offering readymade answers, we will work to interpret literary techniques in each text to describe how they produce meaning: how they construct and deconstruct, undermine and reinvent our understandings of frenzied women. As writers, you will be encouraged to test and revise claims in developing your own arguments. We will tackle the challenges of writing together, working from particulars in texts through multiple drafts in order to craft compelling literary essays.

Possible authors/directors: Djuna Barnes, Ingmar Bergman, Anne Carson, Hélène Cixous, Honoré de Balzac, Julia Ducourneau, Euripides, Sigmund Freud, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Monique Wittig