Writing and Gender in the Age of Disruption

In this course, we will read a wide cross-section of British and American women writers who turned to fiction and poetry to examine, and to survive, their times: Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Una Marson. You will learn how to pay close attention to the often radically new ways these writers bent language to their purposes to express complex emotions and vexed political realities; in your own essay writing, you will learn how to write clearly and persuasively about small units of text and to craft longer critical analyses attentive to language, history, and culture. Always, students will be encouraged to draw connections between then and now, to ponder what has changed, and what remains to be changed, in our own turbulent times.