ENG 2170 Women in Literature

This course will examine representations of women in literature across diverse cultural contexts to study how literary texts enlarge our understanding of how gender roles are both constructed and contested, beyond a conventional gendered binary. The thematic focus of this course will be on women’s struggles for identity and their efforts to negotiate between the conflicting demands of family, tradition, and security versus the desire for independence, autonomy, and agency. The course will examine the ways in which discrimination and injustice against women, variously defined/self-identified in diverse ways, is complicated by issues of race, ethnicity, class, caste, and sexuality. An analysis of various literary texts will reflect the narrative strategies that writers deploy to negotiate complex and overlapping issues of gender injustices, and gender as it is inhabited across a range of sexualities and gender identifications from trans, cis, and queer categories.

This class fulfills UCC area 4:Diversity and Justice and is Writing Intensive Prerequisite(s): ENG 1100 and ENG 1500 Cross Listed Course(s): WGS 2170
Credits: 3.0