Women's Writings

Code:

MEAAM006

Acronym:

EM

Instance: 2009/2010 - 2S

Active?	Yes
Responsible unit:	Department of Anglo-American Studies
Course/CS Responsible:	Masters in Anglo-American Studies

Cycles of Study/Courses

Acronym	No. of Students	Study Plan	Curricular Years	Credits UCN	Credits ECTS	Contact hours	Total Time
MEAA	5	Study Plan since 2007/2008	1	-	9	-

Teaching language

Portuguese

Objectives

The aim pf the seminar is to study the poetry and the poetics of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Adrienne Rich (1929- ), departing from the questions raised in the contents of the program.

Program

Can we speak of a specific writing produced by women? If so, how was the literary canon created and who rules it? How are reading protocols constructed and why does it seem more important to know the gender of the writer if this writer is a woman? Why are we more affected if we know that this woman belongs to a minority, marked by sex, race or a mixed space? And does our way of reading her texts become altered by that knowledge?

Departing from these questions, we shall study four authors – a nineteenth-century woman poet, Emily Dickinson, and two women poets of the second half of the twentieth-century, who belong to the same generation, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. Dickinson will be seen as a “precursor”, establishing a sort of genealogy. We shall consider not only the poetry of Dickinson, Rich and Plath, but also their reflections on the relationship between poetry and the world (therefore we shall also comment on Dickinson’s letters, Plath’s diaries and Rich’s essays).

At the beginning of the course, an anthology with the texts of the poets will be available. Along the course there will be given more specific bibliography.

Mandatory literature

Blazing, Mutlu Konuk; American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms, Yale University Press, , 1087
Rich, Adrienne; What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, W. W. Norton, 1993
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar; The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979
Martin, Wendy; An American Tryptich: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich., University of North Carolina Press, 1984

keywords

Humanities

Evaluation Type

Distributed evaluation without final exam

Assessment Components

Description	Type	Time (hours)	Weight (%)	End date
Attendance (estimated)	Participação presencial	45,00
	Trabalho escrito	146,00		2010-06-19
	Total:	-	0,00

Amount of time allocated to each course unit

Description	Type	Time (hours)	End date
	Estudo autónomo	35	2010-06-19
	Total:	35,00