Following is the final version of the course syllabus. It has been also added as a document file and you can download it from there.

Literature and Gender, 5^th Semester 2006-07

 Instructor: Dr. Evgenia Sifaki ( esifaki@panafonet.gr) Office hours: Friday, 14.00-15.00 and by appointment. Room 703.

Course description: The aim of the course to practice reading literary texts, by both male and female writers, from a feminist perspective. Our starting point will be the following definition of the “feminist reader”: The feminist reader assumes that there is no innocent or neutral approach to literature and that all interpretation is political. The feminist reader might ask, among other questions, how the text represents men and women, what it says about gender relations, how it defines sexual difference. A feminist does not necessarily read in order to praise or to blame, to judge or to censor. More commonly she sets out to assess how the text invites its readers, as members of a specific culture, to understand what it means to be a woman or a man, and so encourages them to reaffirm or to challenge existing cultural norms. (Adapted from the Introduction to The Feminist Reader (Macmillan 1989) by C. Belsey and J. Moore)

Syllabus

1. a) Introduction /Useful terminology b) A feminist reading of To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing, NAEL 2.

2. Two important landmarks in the history of feminism and feminist literary criticism: a) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft (Introduction and Chapter 2) NAEL 2 and b) The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir  (Chapter XI) NATC.

3. The representation of gender and gender relations in poems by men and women: Milton, Paradise Lost (Book 4, ll. 288-311, 449-504) NAEL1, Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House, NAEL 2, Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’  ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, NAEL 2. Christina Rossetti, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnet 21. C. Baudelaire, ‘Το ψοφίμι’.

4. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Legacy’, A Room of One’s Own and Professions for Women NAEL 2.

5. Nineteenth-century novel: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.

6. From the textbook Literature and Gender, by L. Goodman: pp. 49-51, 71-76 and 114-120.

Further Reading (This is not compulsory)

 Cora Kaplan, ‘Speaking/Writing/Feminism’, in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London, Verso, 1986).

Althusser ‘On Ideology’ (NATC)

Jacqueline Rose, ‘Femininity and Its Discontents’, in Mary Eagleton, Feminist Literary Theory, A Reader (Second Edition), (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

Toril Moi, Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman?  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Textbooks: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes 1 and 2 (NAEL 1, NAEL2), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (NATC), Goodman,L., Literature and Gender, Routledge 1996.