WS 2005/6
Fr 12-14, ab: 14.10. 2005, English Department Room 5

Alice-Image designed by Al Razutis

The following texts will be discussed and analysed :

Lord Alfred Tennyson. “The Lady of Shallott” (1832)
Lewis Carroll. Alice Through the Looking Glass. (1872)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse . (1927)
Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar . (1962/3)
Margaret Atwood. Surfacing . (1973)

Films planned for discussion:

Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson,1994)
The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
Dancer in the dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)
Strange days (Katherine Bigelow,1995)

Course-description

The course focuses on texts which centre on female protagonists who cross a threshold at a critical moment in their lives. Understanding the notion of “the looking glass” as transition path to an inverted world, we will explore how such thresholds constitute themselves (in other texts) in water-surfaces, the wall, the bell jar, the window, the lighthouse. Our aim is to trace the symbolic significance of this transition for women who are of different age but share an artistic female self, which is declared in the patriarchal-cultural context (mostly) as oddity, separatist, narcissist, maddened.

As a starting point we focus on Tennyson's poem and Lewis's story which centre on and allude to symbolisms widely tackled in 20 th cent. poststructuralist feminist/gender theory and which allow us to unlock the female-authored literary texts in a new perspective: the Platonic allegory of the cave and the symbolism of Alice crossing the looking-glass. Feminist theoretical discussions of these two topics (e.g. Elisabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, Margaret Whitford) will provide the methodological framework for the course.

We will see that female separatist selves develop, in the process of interrogation of their facture, a potential to decipher patriarchal cartographies of spaces of memory, the psyche, the body & the literal external landscape (rooms, nature etc.) and a potential to read/see/imagine “other” spatio-temporalities by engaging with self-expressive artistic forms of writing or painting. Apart from following the deconstructionist logic of paradox we engage with the metaphor of weaving, originating the myth of the Parcae and Arachne, widely applied in literature and feminist studies (e.g. Bonnie Kime-Scott) to convey women's re-envisioning, re-writing of patriarchal identity patterns.

e-mail for questions

© Melanie Feratova-Loidolt, 2005