WGS.3119 Monstrous Women
The goal of this class is to introduce students to the specialized study of gender in the English Renaissance, focusing specifically on how imaginative texts contributed to the cultural dialogue about women. For early-moderns, monstrosity could both point to the wondrous variety of God's natural world and simultaneously indicate an unnatural superabundance or dearth. According to Galenic biology and Renaissance Christianity, women were physically and morally inferior to men, meaning that on some level women were always monstrous. Using this category as a lens through which we examine images of chastity, licentiousness, witchcraft, madness, cross-dressing, and fantastical female creatures, we will think about how gender was a site of Renaissance debates about what constituted the human. Students will obtain a firm grounding in the historical circumstances of Renaissance life, thought, and literature in addition to learning how to use feminist theory to identify and analyze the strategies used to construct (or deconstruct) narratives about gender. Lastly, in this course, students will learn how to conduct primary research on texts from the Renaissance. The course will culminate in a 15- to 20-page research paper in which students combine their knowledge of theory and literary analysis with historical research.
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Prerequisite: Completion of one 1000 level and one 2000 level English course.