Rudali

Feminist Literary Criticism

Spring 2010
Course prepared by: Salome Tsopurashvili (Salome_tsopurashvili@hotmail.com 858655029)
5 ECTS

Course description

Feminist Literary Criticism is a course designed for MA level students enrolled in the Gender Program which is offered by the Faculty of Social and Political Studies of Tbilisi State University and is administrated by the Centre for Social Sciences. It is a 5 credit course which implies 30 classroom hours and 95 hours of independent work.

The course introduces the students to the history of the feminist literary criticism and to the challenges and the problems it has been facing. The course is thematically split in to three parts. The first part has an introductory character and it familiarizes students with the major trends of the literary theory and main conceptions and prepares them to understand better the following readings included in the syllabus. The second part looks at feminist literary criticism from the historic viewpoint. It inquires why the majority of women writers had been excluding from the male-dominated literary canon, why have their literary achievements been neglected by literary critics. It also questions the role of author and reader and moves forward   what kind of strategies a feminist reader should acquire in order to resist the androcentrism that a literary canon imposes usually on readers. In the third part are included texts which illustrate feminist critics’ different theoretical advances and illustrate how they are using for example psychoanalysis, post-colonial criticism and how they approach to race and sexuality issues.

The course examines and familiarizes the students with those theories and strategies which are most frequently used by feminist scholars when interpreting literary texts and explores what are the stakes and agencies of these theories from a feminist perspective.

Course objectives

      The overall goal of the course is to introduce to students...