HERET(H)ICS
Feminist Negotiations of the Divine, Religion and Dogmatic Iconographies of the Female Body
In Quest for an Ethical Space.
SS 2006
Friday 12-2 pm. / Room 5 English Department / First Session: March 10
Images below - sources:
Left: www.haloimages.com
Right: www. education . theage .com.au/pagedetail.
In 1977, Julia Kristeva coined the term “herethics” to describe an “outlaw ethics”, modelled on an urgent need for a “post-virginal discourse on maternity”, which ultimately would provide both women and men with a new ethics. In a radical revision of patriarchal conceptions of maternity and virginity in Christian history, feminist theorists show how religious doctrines inform a socio-political ethics which historically manifests itself in a breakdown of ethics in heterosexual dialectics.
Exploring masculine literary traditions, which were outspokenly heretical to religious doctrine & social morality (Romanticism, Modernism, Beat), we will see how these rebellious counter-ideologies reproduce the dialectical gender-concepts, since man sets himself up as sublime poet-prophet by exploiting woman as muse/mediatrix. In this course we will investigate how female writers deconstruct masculine definitions of transcendence and try to think beyond gender-polarity: either by embracing a mysticism of a maternal/virginal, liberated from concepts of chastity or eroticisation, or by developing concepts of androgyny which parody both orthodox cults of sexual maturation and haughty male intellectualism. Finally, we will consider how Eliot and Morrison discuss the destructive impact of patriarchal concepts of immaculate/ostracised motherhood in their representations of desperate maternal child-murder, which link the Christian Mary with Euripides' Medea.
Required Readings :
A “Reader” will be provided including feminist theoretical text; excerpts from texts by Edmund Burke & Ann Radcliffe, the Shelleys, the Brontes, Coleridge, Woolf, Confessional & Beat poetry.
Texts available at Kuppitsch am Campus:
Woolf , Virginia . Orlando. (1928)
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. (1859) ; Morrison, Tony. Beloved. (1987)
Requirements :
Regular attendance & portfolio-notes, participation in critical discussions, oral presentation of a chosen topic (10 mins), final written exam.
© Melanie Feratova-Loidolt, 2005