Reading & Composition

In this class, we’ll talk about girls—mean girls, weird girls, sad girls, material girls, girls that run the world, girls that just want to have fun. We’ll ask what it means to call someone a girl, what it means to call something girly. We’ll think about the aesthetics of girlhood from past to present—about lace and ruffles, the color pink and glitter, about combat boots and eyeliner—and the ways these can be and have been used for feminism and for marketing. We’ll consider relationships between girls and between girls and the people around them. Looking at the representation of girls and girlhood in literature, film, philosophy and popular culture, we’ll explore questions of adolescence and
education, gender and sexuality, power and politics from the perspective of the teenage girl.

Since this is an R&C course, its major goals are to improve students’ skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, and to explore the relationships between these three skills. As we hone our close-reading skills, we’ll work on crafting clear and compelling arguments about a range of texts drawn from different genres and time periods. In addition to discussing the assigned readings and viewings in class, students will write responses in a variety of forms, from literary analysis to creative projects. While our focus will be literary, we’ll also consider girls in philosophy, film, and popular culture. Students are encouraged to bring their own texts, classic and pop-cultural,
to class.

Possible texts include:
Sophocles, Antigone
Shakespeare, Hamlet
George Eliot, Mill on the Floss (excerpts)
Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha: Or on the Bodily Education of Young Girls
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (excerpts)
François Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Lucile Hadžihalilović, Innocence
Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides
Lukas Moodysson, Fucking Åmal
A course reader will include poetry by Sappho, Hirimo Îto, Tove Ditlevsen, and Sylvia Plath, as well
as theory by Simone de Beauvoir, Siegfried Kracauer, bell hooks, Catherine Driscoll, Hilton Als,
Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Sianne Ngai.