Girlfriends: Narratives of Friendship

This course is a response to Toni Morrison’s question—“What is friendship between women when unmediated by men?” It examines a range of affiliations and communities in novels and films—including those which are chosen and beyond choice, competitive and cordial, sisterly and extra-familial, psychological and economic. Not primarily a course on homoerotics and lesbian desire, this is a study on the ethics of care and relationality. Friendship is studied as (1) a critical conception for women’s emancipation; (2) an ontological foundation on which connections and lives are built; (3) a mode of relational self-definition.

Select readings: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Muriel Spark; Sula (1973), Toni Morrison; Stir-Fry (1994), Emma Donoghue; Water (2006), Bapsi Sidhwa; Caramel (2007), Nadine Labaki.

Modernist Women’s Writing: 1910-1939

This course examines women’s modernist novels from the period 1910 to 1939 in the light of gender politics and sexual difference that formulate an aesthetic based on radicalised models of subjectivity and sexuality—including the New Woman, the flâneuse, and the lesbian. Gender manifests itself in a variety of experiments with writing and being in the world, from literary naturalism to highly complex modernist forms. To ground the textual manifestations of gender, each novel will be paired with texts drawn from philosophy and literary studies, with focus on the writing and representation(s) of consciousness, perception, space and place.

Select readings: The Return of the Soldier (1918), Rebecca West; Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), May Sinclair; To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf; Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes.

Bad Love in 20C Literature

This course focuses on twentieth-century narratives from America, Asia, and Europe that explore the “badness” of love—including scandalous behaviour, subversive fantasies, shifting identities, moral and social transgressions. Texts are technicians of desire (its mechanics, frustration, and exploits), wherein sex and love are “textualised” that they may escape repression and the difficulties of fulfillment. From Lawrence’s sexual realism to Berger’s cinematic mélange, this course examines how the extent of “badness” is a reflection as well as strategy for expressing concerns and crises around modern life in the fin-de-siècle.

Select readings: Bear (1975), Marian Engel; Rouge, (1987), Stanley Kwan; Chungking Express (1994), Wong Kar-wai; To the Wedding (1995), John Berger; The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy; Lolita (1955), Vladimir Nabokov.

Queer Fictions

This course focuses on twentieth-century narratives that explore sexuality and gender issues in their socio-historical contexts. It examines queer narratives, then moves away from the concerns of gays and lesbians, and towards a more universal conception of queer as non-normative and alternative. As an introductory course, it familiarises students with debates on sexual identities and politics through analyses of fictional works from the US, UK, and Asia, offering a vocabulary for queer experience and perspectives that illuminate queer interiority and relations. Overall, the course reflects on and challenges fictions and critical approaches that are essentially “queer.”

Select readings: The City and The Pillar (1948), Gore Vidal; This is Not For You (1970), Jane Rule; Written on the Body (1992), Jeanette Winterson; Notes of A Crocodile (1994), Qiu Miaojin; The Handmaiden (2016), Park Chan-wook.