Students enrolled in RMST 520 (i.e. graduate students) will produce a twenty-minute presentation in class on a classic author or work of feminist literary criticism or theory. They will pick the text(s) and undertake this presentation in consultation with the instructor.
Your job is to read this material and synthesize and summarize it for the class, telling us about and explaining his key concepts, and emphasizing what seems to you particularly important and relevant for the themes and topics we are studying, which we laid out at the beginning of the semester, and which we have been working our way through since then.
It will therefore be helpful if you make connections to the novels that we are reading, to show how this material may help us further our understanding of these texts.
Let me also emphasize that you should aim to provide a clear, succinct, useful summary of what you have read, drawing out key concepts. Remember that the rest of the class have not read what you have read. Don’t get too lost in the details. Above all, we want concepts and ideas that we can put to use in reading and thinking about women’s writing.
For this assignment in principle you may want to use AI tools (such as ChatGPT) to help you: in theory at least, AI is indeed potentially good at summary and synthesis. But a) this is no substitute for reading the text yourself (so that you can check your reading against what AI provides) and b) you should document and report (to me, if not necessarily to the class) how you have used AI.
The number of presentations will depend on the number of students enrolled in RMST 520, but here are three initial topics:
Presentation I: Women’s Writing. October 2. For this presentation, please report on Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, plus at least one other text. Your task is to examine some of the arguments made for reading women writers (and why women may have not been read as often as men).
Presentation Ia: Women’s Writing. October 16. If necessary (i.e. if there are more students enrolled in RMST 520) we will add more presentation spots, including at least one further discussion of women’s writing.
Presentation II: Ecriture Feminine. For this presentation, please report on Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of Medusa”, plus at least one other text. Your task is to examine the argument that there is a specific form to women’s writing, or that there is a form of writing (whether by men or by women) that is feminine, as opposed to a masculine writing (again, whether by men or women).
Presentation IIa: Trans women’s writing. November 13. If necessary (i.e. if there are more students enrolled in RMST 520) we will add more presentation spots, including potentially a discussion of debates on trans women’s writing.
Presentation III: Diversity and its Discontents. November 27. For this presentation, please report on the rise and critique of diversity policies (sometimes known as DEI). In this case, it may be that some of your sources are magazine articles, news pieces, op-eds, and even blog posts etc. As such, you will probably want to survey and report on more (shorter) texts.