British Feminist Literature. In this course, we will trace the fortunes of British feminism from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. We will begin with early polemics by Judith Drake and Mary Astell, whose rationalism set the tone for eighteenth-century feminist discourse. After studying key Enlightenment feminist texts, we will look at Mary Wollstonecraft's revolutionary Vindication of the Rights of Women and the backlash that followed its publication. Paranoia in Modern Literature and Culture.
Paranoid characters are subject to delusions of grandeur and an unjustified sense of persecution.
They are abnormally suspicious and tend to find hidden meanings everywhere. The social world seems to them fundamentally hostile and manipulative. In this course we will explore the intellectual, social, and imaginative origins of paranoia in the attempt to discover what Don Quixote, Thomas Hobbes, Lemuel Gulliver, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Captain Ahab, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Pynchon all have in common. Women and Comedy. A study of women's comic writing in poetry, prose, drama, and fiction.