ENG 111 - Women Writers

Semester Hours: 4

What defines women’s writing? And how do cultural factors of gender, race, class, spirituality, and sexuality affect the representation and reception of women’s lives? In this course, we will seek answers to these and other provocative questions by exploring a broad, yet representative sampling of literature written by diverse women spanning the eighteenth- through the 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to the ways that cultural context informs literary representations of women’s roles as mothers, daughters, partners, domestics, intellectuals, and revolutionaries; and we will explore how writers’ concerns about these roles generate experiments with literary conventions. Our overarching goal will be to study how the contents and forms of these texts work together to enrich our understanding of women’s experience in particular historical moments, including the present.

Intellectual Perspective: HC