Prof. Jones	2:30-3:45	MW  BH 321
**Cultural Studies Credit**

Why do women want to write? How are their concerns and desires
expressed within the given literary forms and conventions?  How do
their
gender consciousness affect their writing?  Are there cultural
differences in what they write about and in how they do it?  Why is it
that women
authors are particularly self-conscious about writing? This course
will examine these questions on the basis of women's prose fiction in
eastern
and western literatures in the early modern and modern periods.
Rather than surveying women's literature chronologically or divided by
languages/
cultures, the course will closely study varied examples of women's
ideas about writing and their innovations in terms of form, style, and
narrative
devices. Novels in our reading list will include Jane Austen's
Persuasion, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper, Ariyoshi Sawako's  The Doctor's Wife,
Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone.  The course
will also sample short stories by Eudora Welty, Kono Taeko, Maxine
Hong Kingston and others as well as essays by  Virginia Woolf, Hèléne
Cixous and others.
Attendance at two film showings in the evening is required in addition
to class attendance. There will be a midterm and a final examinations,
both of which including brief essay components, and two short in-class
essays on some of the texts studied in the course.