English 465-001
Major Women Writers
Instr: Nardin, Jane
Office: CRT 485; 229-4540
e-mail: jbnardin@uwm.edu
Office hours: by appointment
Course Information: MW; 8:00-9:15am; CRT 309
Course Description
In the early years of the twentieth century, musicians, painters, and writers began to create new art forms that could express the bewildering and exciting complexity of the modern world. Later in the century, critics coined the term "modernism" to describe these developments. Women writers occupied an uneasy position with respect to modernism. They wanted to explore new ways of telling women's stories, but most of them felt unable to play the cultural role in which modernism's most prominent male theorists cast the experimental artist: the role of priest in a new religion of art.
Like their male contemporaries, many women writers of the modernist period were critical of European cultural traditions, but they did not sympathize with T.S. Eliot's longing for an art that would be "socially reactionary," as well as "technically revolutionary." They found nineteenth-century traditions to be repressive to women and wanted to move beyond them into a freer future, while Eliot found those traditions too "eclectic, tolerant, and democratic" to guide the masses and hoped to return to the certainties of an earlier era. Thus the formal innovations of the women modernists often served very different thematic purposes from those of the male modernists.
Woolf and Mansfield are among the most important women writers of fiction who were influenced by-and who influenced-modernism. The two writers were friends, though they had mixed feelings about one another. Both struggled with serious illnesses-mental illness in Woolf's case, physical illness in Mansfield's. Both experienced the world as breathtakingly lovely, but also as dark and dangerous, especially for women. Both articulated powerful critiques of patriarchy; both explored the connections between the human and natural realms; and both were interested in the contrast between Victorian values and those of the twentieth century. Mansfield thought that she and Woolf were "after the same thing" as writers.
In this class, we'll read a mix of novels, essays, and short stories, in an attempt to understand precisely what Woolf and Mansfield were "after" as writers and as modernists. In the process, we'll improve our skills as literary critics and learn something about the modernist movement in literature.
Requirements: Regular attendance is required. Three classes may be missed without penalty, and then the grade will be lowered one notch (e.g., from A to A-) for each additional absence. Class participation will count 25% towards the final grade. The written work for the course will be either three 5-7 page papers, each to be revised in response to my comments, or three take-home essay exams. Students will be able to choose between these two options.Readings:
- Katherine Mansfield: Stories
- Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
- To the Lighthouse
- Between the Acts
- The Complete Shorter Fiction
