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The Idea of the Feminine (HON 407)

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Instructor: Katleen Merrow

Course Content
"Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction-is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see-and therefore live-afresh [. . .]. We need to know the writing of the past, and to know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us." --Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," College English 34.1 (1972): 18-19.

We will use our reading of the assigned texts to:

  1. Acquire a feminist framework for reading the representation of women in Greek tragedy;
  2. Follow a particular genealogy of interpretations of Antigone (Hegel, Lacan, Irigarary, Butler) in the modern period in order to understand the different ways the figure of Antigone has been appropriated as a figure of resistance, and the theoretical stakes at play in using this drama to read structures of kinship, incest, and gender.
  3. Examine contemporary feminist writers whose work constitutes a modern retelling of ancient myth that uses its mythical protagonists to explore feminine identity and feminine voice;
  4. Understand how textual representation fashions and disciplines subjectivity—and can also deconstruct it;
  5. Sharpen your skills in close reading and the work of textual explication.

Required Texts
Sophocles: Antigone in Three Theban Plays
Judith Butler: Antigone's Claim (Columbia University Press)

We will also read the following, available on reserve at PSU Library:

  • Helene P. Foley: Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2001): 172-200
  • Froma Zeitlin: Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Univ. of Chicago 1996): 87-122
  • Nicole Loraux: The Experience of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man (Princeton 1995); 183-193
  • Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 214-227 and An Ethics of Sexual Difference, pp. 116-132
  • Anne and Henry Paolucci, eds., Hegel on Tragedy, pp. 260-73
  • Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 243-270 (Handout)

Detailed schedule information
Contact me for a copy of the complete syllabus with dates for reading and writing assignments.