123046 PS PS Literary Studies (2024W)

In "A Room of One’s Own" (1929), Virginia Woolf famously declared: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Based on her assertion that creating literature - especially longer-form prose - requires a little more than just genius, we will explore the recent history of women’s writing in Britain and revisit "women’s literature" from a critical, intersectional perspective: How do female authors and feminist literary critics challenge the white male canon of British literature? What does it mean to write women’s literature? Who is included? And how are women’s identities entangled with questions of gender, sexuality, race, and class? Do we still need "women’s literature" as a category in publishing and what does it stand for today?

We will use Catherine Riley’s Feminism and Women’s Writing (2018) as the basis for our critical engagement with examples of British women’s writing across genres and identities: From Virginia Woolf’s sharp polemic "A Room of One’s Own" (1929), to selected poems by Carol Ann Duffy, the first Scottish-born, female, lesbian poet to be appointed Poet Laureate in 2009, Tanika Gupta’s play The Empress (2013) that tackles Britain’s colonial past from her perspective as British-Asian female playwright to Bernardine Evaristo’s bestselling Girl, Woman, Other (2019), which made her the first Black woman and first Black British author to win the Booker Prize.

This class introduces students to selected texts in British women’s writing. Based on our class readings and interactive exercises, students will learn how to critically analyse literary texts of various genres with expert terminology and methodologies, how to understand texts in their specific sociocultural contexts (including, e.g. the political and economic circumstances of their publication). Students will learn to understand "women’s literature" beyond binary, essentialist assumptions of gender, as they will have learned to think about gender as co-created in intersectional relations with other cultural markers of difference like race, class or sexuality. Most importantly, students will learn basics in academic writing in the age of AI in line with academic best practice, how to look for secondary literature, how to formulate research questions and find one’s analytic voice, how to structure their first researchs papers and bibliographies.