A couple of courses

1. At the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, next Spring 2010

Gender Studies Program, Spring 2010

GSC 40508 Jane’s Heirs
TR 9:30 am – 10:45 am
Fulfills Humanities Requirement for Undergraduate Majors
Abigail Palko/GSC
What is it about Jane Eyre that has so captured our collective imagination for the past one hundred and fifty years? In this course, we will celebrate Charlotte Brontë’s cultural legacy and assess the enduring appeal of her mousy governess. We will begin by carefully reading Jane Eyre; we will supplement our understanding of the novel by applying selected theoretical approaches (specifically feminist, gender, cultural, and Marxist theories) to the novel. As we work with Brontë’s text, we will explore as well the historical parameters under which she worked, attempting to account for her success. We will then sample the richly varied film and novel adaptations of Brontë’s novel (including Rebecca, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Autobiography of My Mother) to interrogate the story’s continuing hold on our imagination. Our readings of these derivative texts will focus on their constructions of femininity and masculinity and their questioning of social mores to reveal the gendered concerns driving them. Throughout the semester, we will interrogate the ways in which people respond to the literary canon so that their literary intervention and reinventions assure a classic like Jane Eyre’s lasting relevance.

More information on the Keough-Naughton Blog.

2. The other course, more properly seminar, was celebrated in Singapore last October:

Nanyang Technological University
CLASS Seminar Series

"Divine mutations in the environs of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights"
by Susan Pyke, University of Melbourne

Date: 13th October 2009, Tuesday
Time: 11 am – 12.30 pm
Venue: HSS Seminar room 3 (HSS-B1-10)

Abstract
Using the hauntings in and around Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, I will consider how ambivalent ghostly representations can work productively to escape mainstream understandings of the divine/anti-divine. My paper will show where Brontë’s Cathy ghost moves between the ‘real’ and ‘not real’ to suggest that this creates a resonance echoed in productive revisions such as Kate Bush’s pop song ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Anne Carson’s poem, ‘The Glass Essay’. These two texts will be explored in terms of how they also use open-ended representations of the Cathy ghost to move in and out of the containment of psychological and religious perspectives that depend on the completed and repressive discourses of God/Heavenly Father and its inversion, not-god/mother earth. I will argue that like Bronte, Bush and Carson unsettle the ghost trope in ways that encourage the possibility of fragmented divines beyond such normalising discourses.

Categories: Scholar, Talks