English 243-002
Introduction to Literature by Women: Experimental Women Writers
Instr: Bulamur, Naz
Office: CRT 507; 229-6022
e-mail: abulamur@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: TR; 9:30-10:45am; CRT 124
Course Description
This course will examine how women 'do' 'postmodernism' and experiment with fiction. We will see how these experimental fictions challenge our traditional assumptions of reading and interpreting texts. We will observe that there is no linear story line, complex characters, and unity of time and place in the works of these innovative women writers. Not unity and coherence but disorder and chaos would describe their texts. They 'deconstruct' the binaries between autobiography and fiction, story telling and truth telling, and masculinity and femininity. We will discuss the effects of different uses of language-discourses, rhetorical styles, and narrative techniques-in these texts.
With Jazz, we will discuss 'metafiction'--text which foregrounds, even insists, on its textual status. In the works of Harryman and Winterson, we will see how women writers challenge the traditional gender roles and blur the binary between masculinity and femininity. In the light of Cha's, Anzaldua's, and Maso's texts, we will discuss how history and autobiography, like fiction, are not accurate and impartial but "selective" accounts of the past.
Tentative Reading List:
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Carole Maso. The Art Lover
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber
Jeanette Winterson. Sexing the Cherry
Carla Harryman. There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn
