Writers Who are Women and Woman Writers
Dr. Crazy has a post on Canon Formation and Ghettoes in Literary Studies that asks some hard questions about how we frame our teaching of "women writers" or other writers from "the literary ghettoes," and I've been thinking about this a lot in my own teaching, particularly of Brit Lit II.
In that class, I teach nothing but white men for the first half of the semester: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, R Browning, R.L. Stevenson, Kipling, and Wilde. In fact, I have no women on the syllabus until the last weeks of the semester, when I load up: Woolf, Wintersen, Caryl Churchill.
Now, this isn't some anti-woman reactionary stance--quite the opposite, I think. One of the things I found here at WVU was that masculinity went so unexamined that I wanted to focus my syllabus on questions of masculinity and nation/empire over this 200 years of British literary history. So while I'm not teaching many texts by women, I am reading the constructions of masculinity in these texts in a deeply critical way.
But I'm also teaching intro to drama, where "Performing Masculinity" will NOT be the theme. Rather something more like "Crisis and Community" where I focus in part on asking students to look at representations of violence and community, and how they get constructed alongside and against one another. And in this class, texts by white men are going to be a lot less prominent. I haven't decided which texts I'll be using yet, but besides some literary history sections where I have little choice (Ancient Greek theatre, for example), I'll be avoiding overloading the white men in order to have a wider representation of identities in the texts I choose.
Relatedly, I have a footnote in my article on feminist drama that asks whether the feminist project of recovering female figures from the margins doesn't also re-cover them in the margins; that is by invoking them as "significant women who challenged the powers that be" we aren't rooting them in those same margins. This, I guess, is what Dr. C is asking herself, and I tend to to agree.
Comments
Thanks for responding to my post with a post of your own :) You may be interested to note that in the Survey I teach no women in the Romantic period - I do Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron - for many of the same reasons that you cite above. Of course, I then move to the Victorian period, and my version of it does include women and more marginal Victorian writers than Tennyson, but I see why you choose the approach that you do.
My point is not (nor am I saying that you think it is) that we should have equal representation (necessarily) on syllabi but rather that we need to rethink our reasons for why we include what we include. Sometimes it makes sense not to have a lot of women's voices on a syllabus for pedagogical reasons, but there should be pedagogical reasons behind such decisions, you know? Convention shouldn't be something that dictates canonicity, at least as I'm thinking about it right now.
Posted by: Dr. Crazy | April 12, 2006 11:30 AM
What I think we're both getting at is to sure that white masculinity isn't assumed as universal in our pedagogy, and that's crucial.
I'm still looking for ways to bring other identities into the first half of that course in ways that problematize white masculinity as counter texts to Tennyson, Browning, etc. Haven't quite figured that out yet, but I'd be perfectly happy to drop Tennyson, particularly. Suggestions are certainly welcome.
Posted by: Cats & Dogma | April 12, 2006 12:16 PM