LIT 3383 Summer 2023 Biagi

This class is concerned with how conceptions of women’s agency and empowerment have evolved in the contemporary literary landscape. The 19th century saw the emergence of romantic love as a powerful metaphor for idealized happiness between couples and an avenue toward women’s self-realization, agency, and empowerment—and yet we have been challenging this “happily ever after” metaphor ever since. How does romantic love offer empowering opportunities for women, and how does it oppress women by reinscribing dominant, patriarchal systems of power? In what ways do sexuality and pleasure counteract oppression, and in what ways can they be co-opted by it? How do women’s friendships and partnerships, their families, and their participation in motherhood, interact with their empowerment? And what does it look like when women seize power for themselves? We will read a series of contemporary novels that grapple with these themes through imaginings of the historical past, the contemporary present, and the hypothetical future, including Matrix by Lauren Groff, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and The Power by Naomi Alderman.