This course will assume a posture of enquiry not assertion. There will be a definitely exploratory attitude to this course because evidence is strong that feminist literary theory looks for its home on borderlines: it has better things to do than patrol boundaries. Thus, there will be some suggestions of the inter-disciplinary in the course.

The course will review a series of topics that seem to situate and define a good deal of women’s writing on:

1. Discourse-as-power and the politics of women’s writing;

2. Gender and race;

3. Cultural deformations of women into fetish, object, other;

4. Literary canonization that marginalize and silence women.