ENG 261 - Women's Literature In A Global Context
Department: English
Description: Literature by women of diverse ethnicities to examine varieties of texts and their cultural construction.
Credit Hours: 3
Prerequisites: COM 110 and ENG 101
General Education: HUM - Humanities
Current Offerings
Spring 2025
- 001 - Lecture (In Person): T Th 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM , Rebecca Saunders 3.00 hour(s)
- 002 - Lecture (In Person): T Th 3:35 PM - 4:50 PM , Rebecca Saunders 3.00 hour(s)
Dates: 01/13/2025 - 05/03/2025
Location: Adlai E. Stevenson Hall 230 (STV 230)
Instructor: Rebecca Saunders
Class Notes: This course will study contemporary novels by African women from Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Nigeria. Exploring not only how these authors represent their diverse cultures, but how they diverge from, challenge and transform them, we will approach these literary texts as a field of provocations, where imagination, linguistic nuance and novelistic technique intersect with representations of women’s lives and African histories. Some of these texts will give us a fairly straightforward realist story; others will actively seek to derail our reading practices and urge us to risk meaning outside customary comfort zones. All will call on us to analyze not only what they represent, but what they evoke, suggest and question. Paying attention to the structural and stylistic specificities of these novels, we will also explore the social, political and religious contexts in which they are embedded and consider both the ways women’s lives are shaped by factors such as nationality, ethnicity, social or economic class, religion, education, forms of work and the ways in which women intervene in, resist, or rewrite the world around them.
Dates: 01/13/2025 - 05/03/2025
Location: Adlai E. Stevenson Hall 132 (STV 132)
Instructor: Rebecca Saunders
Class Notes: This course will study contemporary novels by African women from Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Nigeria. Exploring not only how these authors represent their diverse cultures, but how they diverge from, challenge and transform them, we will approach these literary texts as a field of provocations, where imagination, linguistic nuance and novelistic technique intersect with representations of women’s lives and African histories. Some of these texts will give us a fairly straightforward realist story; others will actively seek to derail our reading practices and urge us to risk meaning outside customary comfort zones. All will call on us to analyze not only what they represent, but what they evoke, suggest and question. Paying attention to the structural and stylistic specificities of these novels, we will also explore the social, political and religious contexts in which they are embedded and consider both the ways women’s lives are shaped by factors such as nationality, ethnicity, social or economic class, religion, education, forms of work and the ways in which women intervene in, resist, or rewrite the world around them.