Cultural Studies: Narrative, Identity, and Gender

Master's Programme in English Studies: Professional Applications & Intercultural Communication

Academic staff

Course code:

70482114

Type:

Compulsory – Teaching and Research Itinerary (Module 2)

Approach to Education

Blended-learning (25%)

Term

Second

Classroom

Humanities Building II, classroom 12

Teaching period

27 March – 30 May 2025

Teaching times

Wednesdays 16.00 – 18.15

Thursdays 16.00 – 18.15

Teaching guide

Cultural Studies: Narrative, Identity, and Gender

Description

This course analyses the role of women writers in the production of textual meaning: history, themes, genres, structures, discursive strategies, etc. Feminist literary criticism is employed to carry out this type of analysis, which is introduced through seminal critical works such as Ellen Moers' Literary Women (1976), Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and several other studies published since the mid-1970s up to now.

These critical works together with the following literary works: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield and How to Be a Woman by Caitllin Moran, will help students understand the relations between literature and the socio-cultural subordination by women as writers, fictional characters, critics and readers within a male-dominated social order.

Focal attention is given to the treatment of women in texts as either literary subject or object, the marginal situation of women and their consideration as inferior to men in narrative texts, the depiction of the traditional symbolic order in women's writing, the creation and subversion of patriarchal theoretical and cultural constructs, the deconstruction of patriarchal female myths in feminist literature and the intersection between gender, class, race and sexual orientation in contemporary texts.

This course is divided into two thematic blocks:

Block I – Introduction to EFL learning/acquisition processes. Traditional approaches in FLT

‣ Feminist Literary Criticism.

‣ Gender as a construct.

‣ Creation and subversion of feminine myths.

‣ Women as literay subject or object.

‣ The intersection between gender, age, race and sexual orientation in women's narrative.

Block II – Women, literature and identity

‣ Gender and literary canon: Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own).

‣ Gender and subversion: Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).

‣ Literature, class, age, and gender: Katherine Mansfield ("Miss Brill").

‣ Literature and gender construction: Caitllin Moran (How to Be a Woman).