AP LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION

“It’s a Tricky Tuesday!” October 13, 2009Mr. Houghteling

AGENDA:

1. Quiz or review of quiz on “Professions for Women” and “The Rose of the World.” 15 minutes. Please note: if you are late, you may either have less time to finish or return during 10th period to take an alternate quiz.

2. Discussion of Woolf’s essay: what is her issue with Patmore’s poem? Does this resonate today?

3. Feminist criticism: a formal examination of the literary theory.

“Professions for Women”

What is Woolf’s main point regarding “professions for women?”

How is Woolf’s argument reliant on or connected to socioeconomic status?

What rhetorical or literary devices does Woolf use to make her argument?

Literary Criticism – Quick Review We utilize different schools of literary

criticism to unpack texts in different ways. For example, sometimes we are interested

in the time period in which a piece was written (historical criticism). At other times, we may be interested in the relationship between individuals of different social classes (Marxist criticism) or – simply – the way that the text makes us, as readers, feel (reader response theory).

Feminist Criticism

More recently, this has also been called gender theory.

Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theories or politics.

Its history has been varied, from classic works of female authors such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to cutting-edge theoretical work in more recent years.

Feminist Criticism

In the most general sense, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s was concerned with the politics of women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature.

Since the arrival of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity, feminist literary criticism has taken a variety of new routes. It has considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and has examined gender as part of the deconstruction of existing power relations.

What does this mean for us?We will continue examining texts using various schools of literary criticism, including feminist theory.

We will consider the role of gender, the construction of gender, and the power of gender within various texts.

Homework:

Read Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song.”

Apply feminist theory to the text to answer the following question:-How does the Siren’s gender affect her condition? (Or, how is her condition a product of her gender?)