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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures : English Literature

Undergraduate Course: Writing Contemporary Femininities: Experiments in Waywardness (ENLI10377)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Literatures, Languages and Cultures CollegeCollege of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) AvailabilityNot available to visiting students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
Summary'Writing Contemporary Femininities' investigates representations which challenge existing modes and ideals of femininity in a diverse range of contemporary texts. The aim is to question and further understanding of current cultural formations and discourses of the feminine in these texts in order to explore how they reproduce or resist traditional ideals, constrict or promote liberation, limit or expand ideas of the human. In this the course is informed by the notion of waywardness ' behaviour that is difficult to control or predict, prone to the seemingly perverse ' in its questioning of the potential of the feminine for troubling power and imagining life otherwise. We will focus on a deliberately wide variety of texts, from the popular (the chick-lit of Bridget Jones's Diary) to the radically experimental avant garde (Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus), some of whom deploy a purposefully provocative, obscuring and violent style.
Course description The current climate is replete with contradictory ideas, images and interpellations of women and femininity, with vaunted social freedoms existing amidst prominent reporting of sexism and misogyny across cultural contexts and communities. Making sense of this situation after 60 years of feminism is a fraught task, with competing analyses accounting for the persistence of traditional paradigms of gender identities and relations alongside innovative social, personal and sexual liberations which characterise contemporary life. This course addresses how the pressing confusions informing feminine social being are critically engaged and challenged by literary and filmic representations from the recent period. Therefore, it explores what can be characterised as a women's genre of disaffection in contemporary fictions.

'Writing Contemporary Femininities' investigates representations which challenge existing modes and ideals of femininity in a diverse range of contemporary texts. The aim is to question and further understanding of current cultural formations and discourses of the feminine in these texts in order to explore how they reproduce or resist traditional ideals, constrict or promote liberation, limit or expand ideas of the human. In this the course is informed by the notion of waywardness ' behaviour that is difficult to control or predict, prone to the seemingly perverse ' in its questioning of the potential of the feminine for troubling power and imagining life otherwise. We will focus on a deliberately wide variety of texts, from the popular (the chick-lit of Bridget Jones's Diary) to the radically experimental avant garde (Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus), some of whom deploy a purposefully provocative, obscuring and violent style.

In considering current representations of women, particularly in the Scottish context, the course foregrounds questions of form, genre, the significance of representational strategies and style, the relation between fiction and reality, and cultural value. However, it also necessarily engages with critical discourses, particularly postfeminism and its contradictory and ambivalent emanations in cultural critique. Therefore, the primary texts will be read alongside critical theory which addresses the idea of the feminine ' psychoanalysis, difference feminism, the work of Judith Butler ' and which engages the social, cultural and political context, particularly the work of cultural theorists such as Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill, and critiques of postfeminism as a neoliberal discourse. In this the course aims to provide a stimulating snapshot of current gender debates and confusions, and of the character of their interrogation in representations over the recent period.
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Students MUST have passed: ( Literary Studies 1A (ENLI08020) AND Literary Studies 1B (ENLI08021) OR English Literature 1 (ENLI08001) AND Scottish Literature 1 (ENLI08016)) AND ( Literary Studies 2A: English Literature in the World, 1380-1788 (ENLI08024) AND Literary Studies 2B: English Literature in the World, post-1789 (ENLI08025) OR Scottish Literature 2A (ENLI08022) AND Scottish Literature 2B (ENLI08023) OR English Literature 2 (ENLI08003) AND Scottish Literature 2 (ENLI08004))
Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements For students who took First Year courses prior to session 2021-22, a pass in English Literature 1 (ENLI08001) or Scottish Literature 1 (ENLI08016) is an acceptable equivalent
Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. 1. By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of and critical engagement with a range of contemporary fictions concerned with the representation of women and femininity
  2. 2. By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate the relation of these fictions to the wider cultural field of writing and representation
  3. 3. By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of contemporary debates and concepts in feminism and related critical discourses regarding gender identities and relations and representation
  4. 4. By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate the ability to deploy a variety of methodological approaches to the study of gender representation and work with interdisciplinary material.
  5. 5. By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate the ability to reflect constructively on the development of their own learning and research practice
Reading List
Reading Schedule

Introduction
McRobbie, Angela. 'Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.' Feminist Media Studies
4.3(2004): 255-64.

Interrogating postfeminism and its critiques:
Helen Fielding. Bridget Jones's Diary. 1996

Identity: wrecking the heteronormative self:
Kathy Acker. Essential Acker: Selected Writings of Kathy Acker. 2002
Female abjection:
Chris Kraus. I Love Dick. 1997
Extracts will be provided.

Writing female waywardness:
Alan Warner. The Sopranos 1998

Challenging the family:
Sapphire. Push: A Novel. 1996

Encountering the female trickster:
Ali Smith. The Accidental. 2005

Future Girl ¿ speculative femininities:
Jeanette Winterson. The Stone Gods. 2007

Defamiliarizing the feminine:
Films: Shell (dir: Scott Graham) 2012; Under the Skin (dir: Jonathan Glazer) 2013

Homelessness and exile:
Jenni Fagan. The Panopticon. 2012

Writing feminine disaffection:
Eimear McBride. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. 2013
Additional Information
Course URL https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/undergraduate/current/honours
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
Additional Class Delivery Information Seminar: 2 hours per week for 10 weeks;

plus attendance at Autonomous Learning Group for one hour per week each week - at time to be arranged.
KeywordsNot entered
Contacts
Course organiserDr Carole Jones
Tel: (0131 6)50 3068
Email: Carole.Jones@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMrs Anne Budo
Tel: (0131 6)50 4161
Email: a.budo@ed.ac.uk
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