English 310 - SEM:ENABL FICTION:WRIT/WOM/LIV

?Why hath this lady writ her own life?? asked Margaret Cavendish in 1656, a time when a woman needed a plausible, if sometimes fabricated, reason for doing so. We?ll consider a range of women writers from the early modern period to the present, as they construct the narratives of their own lives or those of their families, out of fact, fiction, romance, exaggeration, and equivocation; representing themselves sometimes as respectable, sometimes as heroic or roguish, using enabling fictions to shape their accounts. Beginning with Cavendish and her contemporaries (Anne Halkett, Lucy Hutchinson) we?ll move to texts, both fictional and autobiographical, from the 18th through the 21st centuries, concluding with writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston and Marjane Satrapi. Enrollment limited to 12.

Instructor Permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores