Maternal Narratives

Catalog description

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that maternity is “a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.” In this course we will explore that strange compromise through the nonfiction literature of motherhood, focusing especially on 20th- and 21st-century American essays and memoirs. We will pay particular attention to how writers have rendered the complexity, ambivalence, and contradictory nature of motherhood and the narratives that surround it. How have authors depicted in language what some have felt to be the indescribable? How have they fulfilled or resisted the ideologies and mythologies ascribed to the mother figure? What does it mean to queer the maternal? Such are just some of the questions we will consider. Primary texts may include selections from works such as The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Sister/Outsider by Audre Lorde, Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga and others, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Guidebook to Relative Strangers by Camille Dungy, Motherhood by Sheila Heti, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil by Lezley McSpadden (the mother of Michael Brown), and Breathe: A Letter to my Sons by Imani Perry.