Novel and Feminist Theory

In the past decades, feminist and queer literary theorists have found in the novel a template ripe for critical reflections on key literary, cultural and theoretical questions. The seminar will revisit a number of feminist and queer classics in literature and theory as well as recent novels that have engendered new theoretical imaginings. We will grapple with debated about the crossings of embodiment, difference, power, colonization, and globalization as well as the queer and gendered inflections of narrative, performativity, reading, authorship, plot, time, and space. Readings may include: Austen, Brontë, Cixous, Coetsee, Devi, Flaubert, Freud, Mme De Lafayette, James, Kincaid, Larsen, Lispector, Morrison, Proust, Rhys, Truong, Wintersen, and Woolf; as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Gallop, Gilbert and Gubar, Halberstam, Johnson, Miller, Schor, Sedgwick, Spivak, Warner, and others. Students