The Contemporary World of Women’s Novels

This course selects from among the most interesting, diverse, and well-written of contemporary women’s novels — many from the global South and all from other countries than the US — to focus on questions of women’s writing (and how/whether it can be treated as a literary and formal category), gender identity and women’s issues, and the tensions between sameness and difference among women’s experiences, and narrations of women’s experiences, around the world. The course begins by acknowledging the historical realities that limited women’s narrative options in the publishing industry until quite recently. We will examine a relatively unknown yet rather extraordinary short novel from 1967: Sawako Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife. After Ariyoshi, we will read from quite varied authors published within the last fifty years, writers such as: Buchi Emecheta, Clarice Lispector, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Hanan al-Shaykh, Jeannette Winterson, Rose Tremain, Nora Okja Keller, Fadia Faqir, and Yvonne Vera. We will also read some classic and contemporary feminist literary theory to gain a sense of how feminist scholars approach women’s novels and our questions. The course is especially designed for students interested in women’s and gender issues who have had some previous experience with literary analysis, close reading of texts, and/or feminist theory. As one way to do the work of an intermediate/advanced class, each student will choose an additional author to investigate, either a novelist or theorist who has published since 2000, and read a novel or theoretical essay by this author outside of class.

Students will be evaluated based on class engagement, response papers, passage analyses, a presentation to the class of the outside novel or theory and the questions it raises, and a final evaluation essay. 

Always visit the Registrar's Office for the official course catalog and schedules.