Recovering Lost Voices: French and Francophone Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the…

Catalog description

In this class we will approach the project of recovering lost voices broadly: we will read works by women writers excluded from traditional literary canons, and we will consider how women shaped literary production in diverse ways - as writers, and also patrons, muses, readers, and fictional characters. We will consider what it meant to participate in literary culture, and how writing constituted an exercise of voice that conferred authority and status. We will also interrogate gender as a concern of literary analysis: what does it mean to write like a woman? What difference does gender make in the creation and appreciation of literary works? How do different cultural contexts shape different answers to these questions? In addition to considering gender difference, we will also examine other forms of difference, such as race, class, and nationality, and we will interrogate the fascination of gender for the conceptualization of difference. We will read works by women writing in Medieval France to contemporary Francophone West Africa and Vietnam, as well as literary works and critical essays exploring questions of gender and feminism. Course requirements include: active class discussion, in-class presentations, final paper or annotated bibliography.