CL N1B:1 25005 STENPORT TT 9-11 235 DWINELLE
CLN40 25010 WAREH TuWTh 9-11 2062 VALLEY LSB
Session C
Leading Ladies:
Literature by, for, and about Powerful Renaissance Women
Shrews, queens, conversationalists - women played a variety of
literary and real-life roles in Renaissance culture, and elicited
reactions and responses that were often ambivalent. Shakespeare's
plays stage both exemplary and problematic female power, for
example, while Spenser's Faerie Queene pays homage to Queen Elizabeth
even as it repeatedly portrays women as threatening and deceptive.
In this course we will examine how Renaissance texts depict
women in power, and how these women depict themselves. How did
educational treatises of the day provide the possibility of greater
feminine power even as they emphasized the importance of modesty?
How did Elizabeth use her femininity to help secure her rule, and
in what ways did she renounce that femininity for the same purpose?
These are the kinds of questions we'll ponder as we read texts
from a number of genres that all speak to the problems and the
potential of female authority in the Renaissance.
Required Texts
- Castiglione, The Courtier
- Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew,
Much Ado about Nothing
- Renaissance Drama By Women: Texts and Documents
- A substantial Course Reader, to include such
works as selections from Spenser's Faerie Queene, and selected
speeches of Elizabeth I.
Course Requirements include a variety of writing
assignments, including informal response papers as well as two
to three longer (5-6 pp.) formal papers, and as active participation
and attendance.
CLN60AC 25015 GRIEMAN TuWTh 9-11:30 2038 VALLEY LSB
Session D
"Narratives Of Flight"
By examining tropes of escape, displacement, compelled migration,
and search, this course will explore how narratives of flight
organize a series of questions about American identity and experience.
If fantasies of America have often invoked a promise of itinerancy
as the path of the self-possessed, self-directed free subject, how
might readings that follow the itineraries of more urgent travelers
fugitive slaves, displaced Native Americans, outlaws on the western
frontier, and migrant workers respond to that fantasy, exposing other
modes of freedom and other paths to identity? How might the status
of the person in flight be read as both the fulfillment and the
undoing of such American ideals as errancy, civilization, and
liberty? What happens to the idea of "flight" when it involves
not compulsion but a deliberate choice to set out in search of a
new identity or an idea of home? And ultimately: What is the power
and the threat posed by persons in flight that their stories not
only inspire endless retellings in literature and popular culture,
but also motivate laws that aim to fix and contain them in their
itinerancy? In one sense, the course will trace a trajectory from
imperative to desire as we examine the material realities that
motivate escape, laws that seek to contain and define fugitives
and migrants, as well as narratives of search and longing for homes
and homelands.
Primary Texts
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
- "The Searchers," Dir. John Ford
- Anna Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
- Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Journey Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
- Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker
There will also be a reader containing excerpts from: Sarah
Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes; Sherman Alexie, The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven; This Bridge Called My
Back; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; and other
essays.
