This course will take up the question of how women make narrative, lyric, and genre traditions their own. To that end, we´ll look at examples of hybridity--blurred boundaries between autobiography and fiction, between poetry and prose, between the personal and the political. We are not out to decide if there is a woman´s way of writing. Rather, we are out to discover how, after 20th century literary modernism, women write their world, a world often different from the world experienced by men. However, men are encouraged to take this course. An inquiry we will take up focuses on the relationship between narrative and lyrical forms and the concerns of class and ethnic identities. So if Audre Lorde writes that there is a "sister outsider," is there not also a "brother outsider?" Perhaps writings by women have something to say to all of us who have come up against a dominant story, including a dominant story about gender identity, that we don´t buy into. The course, therefore, is about the stories we tell and the stories we need to write. And because the course is about innovation in form and content, creative writing is an integral component. Imitating a text provides a way to enter the text critically. To that end, we will do creative writing assignments in addition to close readings of the texts and writing that situates the work historically. Authors will most likely include Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Duras, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Harryette Mullen, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Jamaica Kincaid, Sonia Sanchez, Lyn Hejinian, Sandra Cisneros, Tracie Morris, and Toni Morrison.

Jill Magi, home page