Hysterical: Anglophone Women Writers, 1899-today

ENGLISH 90AY Subject & Catalog Number

Description

If the nineteenth century was the era of confinement for women in literature – imprisoned inside attics (Brontë’s Jane Eyre), garrets (Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), and bedrooms (Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”) – then the twentieth century is the era when these women begin to break free. In this course, we will survey global anglophone literature written by and about women from 1899 to today. We will consider how conformity, domestic womanhood, and heteronormativity are eroded or even exploded as writers imagined racial, gendered, and sexual identities that deviated from the constrictions of the nineteenth century. We will explore how emergent ideas about gender converged with, or diverged from, the post/colonial condition. In our readings, we will encounter rage, hysteria, madness, revulsion, disgust, violence, and resistance. We will ask, how and why did these writers and their characters refuse to behave, look like or inhabit the worlds of their mothers? This course may include works by Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Gwendolyn Brooks, LeAnne Howe, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Gloria Anzaldúa.