Engendering Writing

Texts are written by someone, about someone, and for someone, and we often make assumptions about this “someone.” We might mistakenly presume that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is an emotional, confessional text because it is written by a woman, while Prince Jussuf of Thebes (Else Lasker-Schüler) or Tian (Karoline von Günderrode) are male identities with easy access to public, intellectual ideas. In this course we will consider how gender is bound up with the practices of reading and writing. For students of any gender, this course will explore how identity is a literal cultural construction rather than a biological fact. By breaking down the texts and contexts in which the idea of “woman” is created (in the poetry of Droste-Hülshoff and Angelou, the short prose of Tawada, Özdamar, and Lorde, and in three recent films), we will discover how a concept can be presumptuous and constraining, but also challenged and subverted by critical thinking and creative writing.