ENG 405 - Feminism

Semester Hours: 4

Feminism changed everything-relationships between men and women, how women presented and represented themselves, family life, politics, the Academy, the world. It changed how we read texts and how we write them. This is a course about transformation and change-about a movement that changed the world and all of our lives. We will look at feminism as a political movement, as well as a critical approach to reading and understanding literature. We will also look at how women and men, in literary and film texts, reflect, explore and challenge the received gender roles of their society throughout the twentieth century. We will read some of the classic texts of feminism, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, as well as a number of critical essays that approach the subject from different perspectives. We will also read novels, short stories and poetry by such writers as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Bishop.