CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Beginning in the 1970s, feminist literary scholars advocated for a drastic shift in who was considered an appropriate subject of literary study, pushing for the recovery of forgotten women writers and for more serious attention to be paid to women publishing in the present. In the intervening decades, the category of “American women writers” has been both expanded and questioned, as scholars and readers have challenged exclusionary definitions that did not account for differences of race, sexuality, or class or that relied on limiting, binary understandings of gender. What, then, does it mean to study “American women writers” in our contemporary moment?

In order to think through this question, we’ll consider how various writers have addressed three major themes: political and national belonging, responding to and reinventing literary traditions, and depicting the body and its relationship to the erotic. We’ll think about questions of identity throughout, examining our texts through intersecting lenses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability while working to avoid essentializing approaches. This course will introduce you to multiple approaches to literary study, including digital humanities (through a Wikipedia editing project), archival research (in collaboration with the Barnard archives), and traditional close reading and literary analysis.

Scholars have long theorized the relationship between gender and genre; accordingly, we will look at literature across a range of genres as well as that which pushes generic boundaries. We’ll read writing from the 1970s through the present day; writers will include (but are not limited to) Alison Bechdel, Edwidge Danticat, Ada Limón, Layli Long Soldier, Sally Wen Mao, Toni Morrison, Maggie Nelson, Torrey Peters, and Monique Truong.