Gender, Memory, and History in Twentieth Century Fiction

Catalog description

This seminar will investigate the narrative uses of history and memory in US fiction, focusing particularly on the impact of gender on these representations. How do US writers use history in their fiction, and to what ends? What are the effects on drawing on received historical narratives? What challenges does the attempt to represent a historical event pose for a writer of fiction and how might the author negotiate those challenges? Is History a gendered category and, if so, would male and female and trans histories be narrated differently? We will look at the effects of constructing one's own history to fill a void in the received historical narrative, exploring the relationship between history (or History) and memory as well as the fictional representations of that relationship.