32201

WiSe 22/23: Essays by women writers after WW II. Forms, cultural practices, ethics

Sophia Johanna Lohmann

Information for students

Please note that the sessions on October 18th, 25th and November 1st will be held online via Webex.

Comments

In this seminar, we will first develop a brief overview of the form and theory of the essay as a literary genre. Primarily, however, we will read and analyze essays North American women writers who, in particular from the 1960s onwards, appropriated and henceforth shaped the form and tradition of the essay. For some years now, essays by young, not seldom queer, and women of color have been immensely successful in the U.S. However, it has also been fully incorporated into the mainstream and its market logic. Yet how did this come about, given that the essay has long been the form of an exclusive, white "maleness of reason"? Who were the authors who paved the way for the distinctive position of the female essayist? How did different women writers, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s, navigate the field between a patriarchally defined canon, social and cultural upheavals, and their own voices and positions? To understand the profound aesthetic and social influence and the cultural work of women authors after World War II, we will devote some time to canonical authors such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Not least because of the very cultural authority of these writers and their early and pivotal periods of production in the era of counterculture and the women's movement in the United States, the Cold War and accelerating globalization, we will explore how these - and other - women essayists wrote about the Other, about the “world”. Frequently, in the essay itself and in research on it, the "I," the introspection of the writer, takes center stage. While this is highly relevant to an understanding of the genre, we want to venture a shift of perspective and ask: What forms of observation and description, what ethics of regarding the Other (or lack thereof) can be found in these texts? What imagery, cultural valences, and political implications can be distilled from the essays we read? In addition, we will pay special attention to works by African American women writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. African American writers in particular used the essay as a medium of political self-authorization, social critique, and literary renegotiation of cultural knowledge and female and minority subjectivity. Which distinct aesthetics of factual writing did they develop, how did they inscribe themselves in canonical essay traditions, yet how did they also perform productive fractures and critiques of these and develop alternative forms of essayistic thinking and writing? close