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Home 2015-2016 Undergraduate College Catalog Course Offerings English Literature Courses ENG 5119: Monstrous Women (3 cr.)

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ENG 5119: Monstrous Women (3 cr.)

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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