Course Description and Goals

In this course, we will survey the texts of women writers to investigate a range of rhetorical and poetic strategies that illuminate their participation in various "spheres" of social activity, beginning with responses to female autonomy in the English Renaissance and ending with treatises for labor reform in America, with special attention given to trans-Atlantic movement and racial uplift. In contexts as dire as martyrdom, segregation, lynching, class inequity, and even gender normalization and compulsory marriage, what made these women act through their writings when "action" wasn't a nom-du-jour? What movements did their texts help to promote? What definitions could they have helped to disrupt?

We will read in several genres, including polemical essays, short stories, novel excerpts, letters, and public address, drawing on feminist philosophy, feminist criticism, and rhetorical theory as investigative lenses on what we read. Part of that reading involves tracing key concepts that demonstrate how women wrote from the positionings they were assigned (and in some cases, assigned themselves) in order to effect social change. We will then put these concepts into conversation with other critical perspectives to better understand the issues represented in their writing and the intertextual dimensions to their work--that is, how their meanings, constructions, and social uses are shaped by, and help to shape, other texts. Specific course goals include the following:

• gaining a deeper (critical and textual) understanding of the occasions in which women wrote, the perspectives that describe their participation, and the conventions that mark their work;
• developing your foundational skills for literary interpretation and rhetorical analysis;
• identifying and pursuing an original question based on primary texts;
• articulating, supporting, and developing a critical response to that question by bringing secondary materials into conversation with primary texts;
• considering the benefits, drawbacks, limitations, and consequences of establishing a "woman's literary tradition" in English.