WMN4270

Feminist poetics

Dr Susan Conley and Dr Maryanne Dever

12 points
* 2 hours per week
* Second semester
* Clayton

Objectives Students successfully completing this subject will have a broad understanding of Victorian and modern poetics, and of the relationship between sexual and textual politics in relation to poetics. Students will gain a detailed knowledge of the work of representative women poets writing in English from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, having informed their reading with key aspects of contemporary feminist theory and developed skills in close textual analysis and in written argument.

Synopsis This seminar subject investigates questions of gender and genre, that is, of the relationship between sexual politics and discursive formations, with special reference to the domain of poetics. Beginning with two major poets of the nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson, we consider how their poetry works both within and against the dominant poetic discourses of their day. A more radical break with Victorian models - both sexual and textual - is registered in the work of modernists H D and Virginia Woolf. The texts of Woolf and, later, Winterson, foreground questions of generic boundaries and the interplay of lyric and narrative modes. The second half of this course focuses on later twentieth-century and contemporary women writers, where we continue to explore how and to what extent generic and formal experimentation is informed by the disruption of categories of gender and sexuality.

Assessment Class participation: 20%
* Short essay on a common topic (3000 words): 30%
* Long research essay based on oral presentation of seminar paper (6000 words): 50%

Prescribed texts

Dickinson, E A Choice of Emily Dickinson's verse ed. Ted Hughes, Faber, 1968
Hacker M Love, death and the changing of the seasons Norton, 1995
H D The collected poems of H D ed. L Martz New Directions, 1983
Porter D Akhenaten UQP 1992
Rich A The fact of a doorframe Norton, 1984
Rossetti C Poems and prose ed. J Marsh, Everyman, 1994
Smith S New selected poems New Directions, 1988
Winterson J Written on the body Vintage, 1993
Woolf V The waves ed. Gillian Beer, World's Classics, 1992