toc
intro
syllabus
religion
self-fashioning
gender and sexuality
love and marriage
imagined worlds
places and spaces
bizarre
danger: love
writing and fame
la querelle femmes
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Syllabus

Comparative Literature 181, Section 09, Spring 2003
The "Tenth Muse" Phenomenon

Professor Stephanie Merrim
Office: 103 Marston Hall
Phone: x33159
Email: [email protected]
Office hours: Friday, 3-5, and after class.

Objectives/ Agenda: To form a cross-cultural picture of women's writings and issues on the cusp of modernity in Spain, Latin America, North America, England, and France, focusing on writers published and/or celebrated in their times. A corresponding aim is for us to compile by the end of the course a comparative Book of the Tenth Muse, to be posted online.

I. TEXTS FOR PURCHASE from Brown Bookstore:
1. Catalina de Erauso. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. Trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
2. Mme de Lafayette. The Princesse of Clèves. Ed. John D. Lyons. NY: Norton, 1994.
3. Margaret Cavendish Newcastle. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Eds. Sylvia Bowerbank, Sara Mendelson. Canada: Broadview Press, 2000.
4. Alan S. Trueblood, ed. A Sor Juana Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
5. María de Zayas y Sotomayor. The Disenchantments of Love. Trans. H. Patsy Boyer. Albany: SUNYPress, 1997.

*The rest of the texts for the course are in a coursepacket available for purchase from Allegra Copy, on the corner of Thayer and Waterman Streets.

*You are strongly encouraged to read the texts in their original languages. The originals are on two-day reserve at the Rockefeller Library. You may also order them from Amazon.com. I recommend the following editions:
--Erauso, Catalina de. Historia de la monja alférez escrita por ella misma. Ed. Jesús Munárriz. Madrid: Hiperion, 1986.
--Mme de Lafayette. La Princesse de Cléves et autres romans. Ed. Bernard Pingaud. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
--Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. Obras completas. Porrúa: most recent edition.
--Zayas y Sotomayor, Desengaños amorosos. Ed. Alicia Yllera. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983.

--Other activities: We will screen at least a couple of films and visit the seventeenth-century Arnold House in Lincoln, RI. Dates and details of activities will be announced in class.


II. COURSE MECHANICS AND GRADING:
Course Mechanics: The course is a true seminar, with a minimum of lecturing and a maximum of discussion. Weekly questions and weekly commentaries, as follows, are intended to foment class discussion and your involvement with the material.

--Weekly questions: Each week, you will bring to class a question on any aspect of the week's readings. Questions should reflect your own queries or thoughts on the readings and/or raise issues that you would like to have discussed in class. You should be prepared to lead discussion on your question.

--Weekly commentaries: In preparation for our Book of the Tenth Muse, each week you will prepare for presentation in class a brief (2 paragraph) written commentary on the role of one of the following themes in the week's reading:

Education and learning; religion; self-fashioning; querelle des femmes, gender, and sexuality; love and marriage; imagined worlds; places and spaces; ex-centricity (eccentricity, the bizarre or shocking, margins vs. center); writing and fame.

You will choose your theme freely each week but, for continuity and comparison, will need to follow at least one theme in at least two texts for each half of the semester.

--Journals: The weekly questions and polished versions of the commentaries detailed above will comprise the journals that you will hand in at midterm and at the end of the semester for my feedback.

Requirements and Grading:
1. Class attendance, participation: 30% of the grade.
You are expected to attend and participate actively in each class. Both the quality and quantity of interventions will be taken into account.

2. Journals, submitted at midterm and at the end of the course: 25% of the grade.

3. Midterm project, due Friday, March 14: 20% of the grade. Building on the journal submitted at midterm, you will develop at least two commentaries on the same theme into a 5 page comparative paper. Creative efforts that fulfill this mission (plays, poetry, fictional diaries, short stories, and so on) are welcome. We will all read each other's midterm projects.

3. Final paper: 25% of the grade.
For your final paper, as your contribution to The Book of the Tenth Muse, you will track one theme through a variety of the texts that we have studied over the course of the semester in a 12-15 page paper. More specific details on the final paper and its due date will be determined in class.


III. COURSEPLAN:
(Please do all readings for each week, in the order given on the syllabus)

1. January 22: Introduction to course, to the "Tenth Muse Phenomenon"

2. January 29: Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre.
        *Critical Readings (all in coursepack): Joan Kelly, "Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes"; Introduction to Pizan by Marina Warner, and to Navarre by Paul Chilton. Recommended: Gerda Lerner, Introduction to the Creation of a Feminist Consciousness.
        *Primary Texts (both in coursepack): Selections from Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, and Marguerite de Navarre, Heptameron.

3. February 5: Male perspectives on the Querelle des Femmes, 16th-17th centuries.
        *Visit of Director of Women Writers Project. Familiarize yourselves with the WomenWriters Project website: mission, texts, ancillary essays at:
        http://www.wwp.brown.edu
(If you are off campus, you will need to set up a remote access session through the Brown Library Home page; then go to "w" in the library electronic resources alphabetical index, and find the "Women Writers Project).
        *Critical Readings: Stephanie Merrim, Introduction to Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [coursepack].
        *Primary texts (all short pieces, all in coursepack): Erasmus, "The Abbot and the Learned Lady"; Fray Luis de León, Intro and ch. I, The Perfect Married Woman; "Hic Mulier"; François Poullain de la Barre, selections from The Woman as Good as the Man.

4. February 12: Catalina de Erauso.
        *Critical Readings: Introduction and Translators Note to Lieutenant Nun.
        *Primary Text: Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World.

5. February 19: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
        *Film: Tuesday, February 18 at 7:00 in Music Room, 84 Prospect St.
        *Critical Readings: Alan S. Trueblood, Introduction to A Sor Juana Anthology. (You may also look at the Arenal reading for March 5.
        *Primary Texts: "Spiritual Self-Defense" (coursepack); "Admonishment," and "Reply to Sor Philotea," 199-243, Trueblood anthology.

6. February 26: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
        *Critical Readings: Georgina Sabat-Rivers, "A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana's Dream" (coursepack).
        *Primary Text: First Dream, 166-195, Trueblood anthology.

7. March 5: Anne Bradstreet.
        *Friday, February 28: Visit to Arnold House in Lincoln, RI.
        *Critical Readings: Electa Arenal, Introduction to This Life Within Me... (coursepack). You may also read the "Contextual Materials" for Anne Bradstreet, Women Writers' Project.
        *Primary Readings: "To my Dear Children"; This Life Within Me Won't Keep Still (both in coursepack; full versions of all the poems by Bradstreet quoted in the play are available from the Women Writers Project).

8. March 12: Margaret Lucas Cavendish.
        *Critical Readings: Introduction to Paper Bodies by Bowerbank and Mendelson. You may also read the "Contextual Materials" for Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure, Women Writers Project.
        *Primary Texts: The Convent of Pleasure (in Paper Bodies), and the short pieces on the following pages of Paper Bodies: 86-90; 143-47; 252-53 (on 253, just continuation of "Eare-ring," not "Squaring the Circle"); 301-03.

JOURNALS/MIDTERMPROJECT DUE Friday, March 14, by 4:00, in my box.

9. March 19: Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle.
        *Critical Readings: See "Contextual Materials" for Cavendish's Blazing World in Women Writers Project.
        *Primary Texts: Selections from Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (coursepack); Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World in Paper Bodies (in class we will concentrate on the following sections: 151-174; 206-216; 228-230; 250-51. You are of course welcome to read the whole text).

SPRINGBREAK

10. April 2: María de Zayas and Miguel de Cervantes.
        *Critical Reading: Introduction by Patsy Boyer to Enchantments (coursepack).
        *Primary Texts: Cervantes, "The Jealous Husband;" Zayas, selections from The Enchantments of Love (both in coursepack).

11. April 9: María de Zayas.
        *Critical Reading: Introduction by Patsy Boyer to Disenchantments.
        *Primary Texts: The Disenchantments of Love: 35-42 and all other "frame story sections"; "Too Late Undeceived"; "Love For the Sake of Conquest"; "Marriage Abroad: Portent of Doom"; 398-405.

12. April 16: Mme de Lafayette.
        *Critical Readings: Introduction; Editor's Afterword by John Lyons to his edition of the novel; Study Guide (coursepack). Be sure to consult the "Glossary of Characters" at the end of the edition.
        *Primary Text: The Princess of Clèves (read the whole novel).

13. April 23: Mme de Lafayette/ Presentations of final paper proposals.
        *Critical Readings: Peggy Kamuf, "A Mother's Will"; Joan DeJean, "Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity" (both in Lyons edition).
        *Primary Texts: revisit La Princesse de Clèves.


IV. BOOKS ON RESERVE AT THE ROCKEFELLER LIBRARY FOR CO-181, SEC. 09

[Non-English originals of the primary texts are on 2-day reserve. All other works are on 24 hour reserve.]

Primary Texts:
--Cavendish, Margaret Newcastle. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. PQ1805.L5 A72 1994
--Cervantes, Miguel de. Exemplary stories. PQ6329 .A6 1972
--Cervantes, Miguel de. Novelas ejemplares. PQ6324 .A1x 1980 v.1
--Erauso, Catalina de. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. PN57.E68 V45 2000
--Erauso, Catalina de. Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alférez. CT1358.E7 A3 1992
--Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sister. Obras completas. Ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. PQ7296 .J6 1951 vols. 1-4
--Lafayette, Mme de. The Princesse of Clèves. Ed. John D. Lyons. PQ1805.L5 A72 1994
--Lafayette, Mme de. La Princesse de Cléves et autres romans. Ed. Bernard Pingaud. PQ1805.L5 P62x 1972
--Trueblood, Alan S. Ed. A Sor Juana Anthology. PQ7296.J6 A28 1988
--Zayas y Sotomayor, María de. The Disenchantments of Love. PQ6498.Z5 P3713 1997
--Zayas y Sotomayor, María de. Obra narrativa completa. PQ6498.Z5 A6 2001

Secondary Sources:
General/ Theory:
--Davis, Natalie Zemon and Arlette Farge. A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Vol. 3: HQ1121 .S79513 1992
--Ferguson, Margaret W. et al, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance : The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. HQ1075.5.E85 R48 1986.
--Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe. PN1181 .J66 1990 c.2
--Keller, Evelyn. Reflections on Gender and Science. Q175 .K28 1985
--Kelly, Joan. Women, History & Theory : The Essays of Joan Kelly. HQ1154 .K38 1984
--Labalme, Particia. Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. HQ1148 .B49
--Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. HQ1075 .L37 1990
--Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. HQ1121 .L47 1986 v.2
--Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. PQ7296.J6 Z697 1999
--Wilson, Katharina and Frank Warnke. Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century. PN471 .W57 1989

England:
--Smith, Hilda. Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. HQ1599.E5 S62 1982

France:
--Beasley, Faith. Revising Memory: Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France. PQ637.A96 B43 1990
--Maclean, Ian. Woman Triumphant : Feminism in French Literature, 1610-1652. PQ245 .M3

Latin America:
--Johnson, Julie Greer. Women in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Literary Images. PQ7081 .J54 1983
--Merrim, Stephanie. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. PQ7296.J6 Z656 1991

North America:
--Schweitzer, Ivy. The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England. PS312 .S38 1991

Spain:
--El Saffar, Ruth. Rapture Encaged : The Suppression of the Feminine in Western Culture. BF175.5.I53 E4 1994
--Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. HQ1695.S48 P47 1990

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