This class focuses on the figure of woman as she appears in 20th and 21st century prose, all by female writers, and mostly but not exclusively fiction. Female “creatives”—writers and visual artists--are a leitmotif in both the fiction and the nonfiction. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own serves as a point of connection throughout the term’s readings, and that’s where we start.
Our longest novel is easily Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014). While not a roman a clé, its author draws on the lives and works of female artists including Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Alice Neel, and Lee Krasner. You may wish to acquaint yourself with any or all of them—Hustvedt herself has written about Neel. But if it's not a roman a clé, fiction is not veiled biography: pay attention to the form of Hustvedt’s novel; and of the artworks described in it—aka ekphrasis. (If words like ekphrasis make you nervous, don’t worry. If looking up words makes you nervous – and/or irritable -- you will need to find another class.)
Other authors may include the 2024 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing Nadia David and her story “Bridling”; British-Zambian Namwali Serpell; American Claire Messud (either The Burning Girl, with its motif of Greek myths coursing through the contemporary lives of a young writer and her best friend, or The Woman Upstairs, which “stars” two fictive female visual artists alongside historical ones (Woolf, Plath, Neel again); the English Angela Carter, with her short-story revisions of fairy tales; and the debut novel Lote (2023) by the Scottish writer Shola von Reinhold, which artfully stages researching a fictional modernist poet, a Black woman moving in the primarily white world that 1920s history has absorbed as Bloomsbury and the Bright Young Things—which brings us back to Woolf and company.
Like the Hustvedt, Lote plays with scholarship as a fictional frame, and we will be very attentive to the forms of our texts--so if that leaves you cold, you might look elsewhere. (Be aware as well that there’s periodically a lot of reading in this class.) Another recurrent issues will be the relation between fiction and non-fiction; art and life; and public and private.
The class employs in-person discussion and periodic brief lecture. Grades are based on two papers; a series of short response papers, each predicated on the student having completed the reading in its entirety; informed class discussion; and the occasional quiz. Screens are not allowed in the classroom.
NB: We may read Heroines by Kate Zambreno, “a manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars”: feel free to contact me if you’d like to advocate for it; I’m currently torn.