Women in Literature
Requirement: UCLR 100 for students admitted to Loyola University for Fall 2012 or later. No requirement for students admitted to Loyola prior to Fall 2012 or those with a declared major or minor in the Department of English, Department of Classical Studies, or Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.
This course focuses on the representation of women in literature, as discussed in a variety of literary works.
Outcomes: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the representations of women in various periods of literary history and diverse cultural contexts.
Requirement: UCLR 100 for students admitted to Loyola University for Fall 2012 or later. No requirement for students admitted to Loyola prior to Fall 2012 or those with a declared major or minor in the Department of English, Department of Classical Studies, or Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.
This course focuses on the representation of women in literature, as discussed in a variety of literary works.
Outcomes: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the representations of women in various periods of literary history and diverse cultural contexts.
Pre-requisites: UCWR 110, C- or higher
Tier 2 Literary Knowledge
Women & Gender Studies
This is a writing intensive class. A grade of C- or better in UCWR 110 is required to enroll.
Woman (in Print) in the Nineteenth Century
This course will investigate how various female authors of nineteenth-century America influenced and were influenced by the medium of print, both in their creative output and in their notions of what femininity and womanhood entailed. This course proposes that the construction of femininity as a societal notion is not solely influenced by discourse (i.e., what people are saying about femininity), but is also influenced by the medium via which the discourse is communicated (i.e., a handwritten letter, a Tweet, or, for this course, a printed text). We will read tracts, short stories, poems, novels, editorials, and excerpts by woman authors and ask ourselves what it means to be a woman in print in the nineteenth century. We will explore reasons why a woman might choose to print her work, or, like Emily Dickinson, choose to mostly refrain from printing. We will consider how women are represented in print by authors of both genders, searching for differences and similarities between the man-authored woman of the nineteenth century and the woman-authored woman of the nineteenth century. We will investigate how various mechanics of the print world, such as reprintings, revised editions, and serial publications, affected portrayals of femininity and women. Furthermore, we will consider how notions of race affected notions of femininity in nineteenth-century America; unfortunately, many white feminist authors had less-than-stellar viewpoints on racial difference by today¿s standards, and these viewpoints often tinged their notions of womanhood in exclusionary ways. In spite of this, we will read generously, asking ourselves how each author attempted or did not attempt to confront her own and others¿ biases within her printed work, and acknowledging the pitfalls and/or benefits of engaging in the ultimately doomed task of theorizing an essential womanhood.
The majority of the texts we read in this course will be authored by women, with Margaret Fuller¿s tract Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Julia C. Collins¿s novella The Curse of Caste or, the Slave Bride, and Pauline Hopkins¿s novel Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self-serving as our longform texts. However, we will also read shorter works by Emily Dickinson, Lydia Sigourney, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), Frances E.W. Harper, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and issues of print magazines edited by Sarah Josepha Hale and Pauline Hopkins.
This is a writing-intensive course, so a portion of our class lectures will also be focused on writing style and clarity, and students will complete lessons from Joseph Williams¿s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace as part of their homework.
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