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.
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 long books.
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.
Texts or authors that may possibly be the basis for such a presentation include:
- Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa”
- Rachel Blau DuPlessis
- Rita Felski
- Sandra Gilbert
- Audre Lorde
- Nancy Miller
- Naomi Schor
- Elaine Showalter
- Janet Todd
- bell hooks
Here is a bilbliography that may provide further ideas.