“The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
How do women describe their own experiences in literature? The reading group will explore this question on the basis of different text genres from a diverse selection of time periods and geographical areas. In a first session, the theoretical foundations for the following discussions will be laid through fundamental texts by Virginia Woolf and Pam Morris. We will then embark on a journey through time and space of female accounts of their experiences in literature. We will also analyse the use of different types of texts, from comics to poetry, and their impact. In a last session, there will be room for our own personal thoughts and experiences.
Organisation: Angela Odermatt
Coordination: Stefano Aloise
Administration: Michelle Hug
Suggested Session Topics and Literature: (titles in italic are further suggestions)
- Theoretical Approaches to Women in Literature
- A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (1929)
- Excerpts from: Literature and Feminism: An Introduction – Pam Morris (1993)
- Le deuxième sexe – Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
- From “Classic” Literature to Female Experiences
- Wide Saragasso Sea – Jean Rhys (1966)
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (1847)
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (1963)
- The Awakening – Kate Chopin (1900)
- Short Stories and Poems: Pride, Despair, Ethnic Groups
- Phenomenal Woman – Maya Angelou (1978)
- The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window – Joy Harjo (2006)
- Mushrooms – Sylvia Plath (1959)
- The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins-Gilman (1892)
- Sister Outsider – Audre Lorde (1984)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou (1969)
- Passing – Nella Larsen (1929)
- New Literary Forms: Oppression and Hope
- Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi (2000-03)
- The Copenhagen Trilogy – Tove Ditlevsen (1967-71)
- Becoming Unbecoming – Una (2015)
- Broadening of Gender Experiences and Contemporary Discussions
- Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo (2019)
- 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World – Elif Shafak (2019)
- Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2013)
- Autobiographies of Deborah Levy (2013-21)
- Burnt Sugar – Avni Doshi (2019)
- TBD, Suggestion: sharing our own experiences and thoughts
Meetings: to be defined
Language: Most texts are in English, however, participants are free to choose what language to use for the discussion of the texts.
Meeting Place: Zurich
Participants: about 10 students from all fields of study
