Choose any one of the three novels from the first half of the term (ideally, you would choose just one, but you can do a comparative paper if you wish — check with me first):
Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden (1836)
Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life (1848)
Lev Tolstoy, Kreuzer Sonata (1889)
Using any of the theoretical texts we have read thus far (ideally, you would choose 1 or 2):
Freud, Riviere, Foucault, Armstrong, Healey, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Irigaray, Butler, Halberstam, Gilbert & Gubar, or Rubin.
The theoretical readings are meant to serve as different approaches to the literary texts, so feel free to mix and match.
The point of these writing assignments is two-fold: you are being trained to read closely, and you are being asked to think about the “big picture.” How does a text work? How is it put together? What images, symbols, themes does it engage with? How is it structured? What are the stakes? What kind of language is it using? And then: so what? Ultimately, you are asking yourself not only “what does this text mean?” but “how does it mean?” What operations does it use to get its point across and what is that point? You must think both big and small. You must pay attention to detail, while keeping the entire text in mind, and how it fits into the women’s literary tradition we are interested in in this course. You may bring in or reference outside material, but be sure to provide citations for any texts that you use.
Please see the MLA style sheet for correct use of notes as well as other questions about formatting your paper:
http://www.mtroyal.ca/library/files/citation/mla_research.pdf
If you learn to read closely and to analyze a text well, you will have learned the most important thing you can take away from college: critical thinking. “Critical” not in the sense of finding flaws, but in the German sense of the word: to pull apart, to analyze. This class is about reading, writing, and thinking. These papers are your chance to do just that.
As always, make sure that the work you turn in is your own. It is easy to find a paper on the “woman question” and Tolstoy’s Kreuzer Sonata, for example, but this will not earn you an A. Instead, you will fail the class.
Themes & variations:
1) Many of our theoretical readings stress the idea of gender as a construct, culturally and historically determined; explain how the protagonists of the works we have read thus far struggle with or embrace their gendered selves
2) The body, too, is a construct? How do you see the body treated in these texts? Where does it appear and where does it disappear? What does it look like and how does it behave?
3) 19C texts are not likely to be explicit about sexuality, and yet, sexual identity and sexual desire are integral to the novel as they are to everyday experience. Where / how do we see sexuality hidden or expressed? What is said and what remains unspoken and why? You might think about Butler’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” as necessary for the (re)production of patriarchy.
4) What kind of agency do women have in (a patriarchal) society? I am not looking for a general answer, but one that is specific to the texts we have read thus far. How is agency constructed, delimited, or expressed? Does the text itself police its characters? And what about its readers? What lessons are we (“ideal” or actual readers) supposed to take away from these efforts?
5) What about masculinity? How is it treated, expressed, delimited, or constructed?
6) Cixous and Irigaray are invested in the possibility of a different kind of writing, something they call “écriture féminine”; explain what that is and whether or not any of our texts could be read as practicing a different kind of (feminine, female, feminist, non or anti-phallogocentric) writing
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