EMAIL for registration

centro.ang@fl.ul.pt

Registration

18 October – 22 November 2011

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Room 5.2. 
Tuesdays. 6 p.m. – 8.30 p.m.

Total: 5 WEEKS/ 12h30 (1 ECTS)

Convenors

Ana Raquel Fernandes MA, PhD (ULICES/Univ. of Birmingham)

Diana Almeida MA, PhD (ULICES/FCT)

Zuzanna Sanches PhD (ULICES/CETAPS)

Organization: ULICES / University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies.

Aims and Objectives

This workshop will address the work of contemporary women artists in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the U.S.A and Portugal. The analysis of the literary production by different authors and the dialogue established with the work of contemporary visual artists will lead us to a debate concerning concepts central to female authorship: identity and creativity, agency and subversion, the public and private realms.

Teaching Methods and Assessment

1.     There are 2h30 weekly seminars.

2.     Seminars given by the three convenors.

3.     Four assignments/thinking points (10%) and a 4,000 word essay (60%).

Full Plan of the Module including Reading and Assignments at http://identitysubversion.blogspot.com/

Registration Form: 

Name:__________________________________________________________________

Profession:_____________________________________________________________

Institution: _______________________________________________________________________

Address: _______________________________________________________________________

Telephone: _______________________________________________________________________

E-mail: _______________________________________________________________________

FEE / With assessment and certificate

General Public – 75 Euros

FLUL staff – 50 Euros

Students (undergraduates, MA and PhD) – 30 Euros

·      Payment may be:

by bank transfer (to NIB: 0035 0824 00005247630 04, CGD)

OR by cheque (to Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa) sent by post to:

Centro de Estudos Anglísticos

A/C Daniela Coelho

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Alameda da Universidade

1600-214 Lisboa

Portugal

Note: Only after proof of payment will the registration be accepted.

Availability: A maximum of 25 students may attend the workshop.

Bio Notes

• Ana Raquel Fernandes (ULICES/Univ. of Birmingham)

Dr Fernandes took her first degree in the Universidade de Lisboa, in Modern Languages and Literatures. She received an MA in Comparative Literature (Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, 2004). Her thesis was published in a book entitled: O Pícaro e o Rogue. Sobrevivência e Metamorfose de Daniel Defoe a Julian Barnes (Lisboa: Colibri, 2006). In 2008 Dr Fernandes completed her PhD (Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Comparatistas). Her thesis was turned into a book entitled: What about the Rogue? Survival and Metamorphosis in Contemporary British Literature and Culture and published by Peter Lang in 2011 (Comparatism and Society Series, No. 15).

Currently she is a researcher at the ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. She has been awarded a grant by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal, to carry out research for her Postdoctoral work on the short story in contemporary British and Portuguese women’s writing. The research project is being developed in joint collaboration with the Cátedra Gil Vicente in the University of Birmingham. She has also been conferred upon the title of Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music, University of Birmingham.

Dr Fernandes currently teaches at ISLA Campus Lisboa – Instituto Superior de Línguas e Administração.

• Diana Almeida

ULICES (University of Lisbon Center for English Studies)//FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology)

Currently teaches Creative Writing, North American Art, and Visual Culture in FLUL (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon).

Post-graduate project: Bodily Figurations in the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Luiza Neto Jorge, Cindy Sherman and Helena Almeida. Creative writing in the museum (Berardo Collection) connecting literature and photography.

PhD in American Literature and Culture. The Contours of Light and Words: Storytelling and Photography in Eudora Welty’s Short Stories, FLUL, 2007. // M.A. In American Literature and Culture. Raymond Carver: American Polaroids, FLUL, 2000.

Has researched and published on short story and poetry in dialogue with other arts. Has translated Dylan Thomas, Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty among others.

Photography: arodaemroda.blogspot.com

• Zuzanna Sanches (ULICES/CETAPS)

Holds a PhD in English Literature written on The Counter-Discourses of Femininity in Elizabeth Bowen’s longer fiction. Studied at the University of Warsaw, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Universidade de Lisboa. Presently she is a researcher at ULICES/CEAUL – (Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa) in the Moderna Diferença research cluster. She is a collaborator with CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies)/Relational Forms and the IIH (International Institute for Hermeneutics). She has a FCT post-doctoral fellowship with a project on contemporary Irish women writers supervised by Professora Doutora Luísa Flora and Professor Margaret Kelleher. She is a visiting research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Program

October – November 2011

Identity and Subversion in Contemporary Women Artists 

Ana Raquel Fernandes MA, PhD (ULICES/Univ. of Birmingham)

Diana Almeida MA, PhD (ULICES)

Zuzanna Sanches PhD (ULICES/CETAPS)

            This workshop will address the work of contemporary women artists in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the U.S.A and Portugal. The analysis of the literary production by different authors and the dialogue established with the work of contemporary visual artists will lead us to a debate concerning concepts central to female authorship: identity and creativity, agency and subversion, the public and private realms.

WORKSHOP 1:                     WORKS AND CONTEXTS: Questions Behind Female Authorship

Ana Raquel Fernandes

Diana Almeida

Zuzanna Sanches

For decades feminist theorists have been trying to establish the speaking position of women writers and artists creating within often sharply demarcated zones of public and private activity. The heterogeneity of apparently coterminous female roles has been surfacing in literature and art, subverting the tenets of essentialist and non-essentialist feminist theories. These seminars will question the concepts of gender, embodiment and authorship from a female perspective. The texts analyzed will testify to female fluidity, a notion that (metaphorically) illustrates women’s movement between the margins and the centre, from a position of subordination towards affirmation of agency and creativity.

Primary texts

Literary texts

Boland, Eavan. “Anna Liffey.” in Wee Girls: Women Writing from an Irish Perspective. Lizz Murphy (Ed.). North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000 [1996]:362-369.

Rossetti, Christina. “In an artist’s studio”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. Vol. 2. 6^th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993: 1476.

Dickinson, Emily. “This is My Letter to the World” and “They Shut Me Up in Prose”. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1996 [1985], 867, 874.

Critical texts

Bünsch, Iris. “The Reality of Woman”. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Lucinda Ebersole, eds. Women, Creativity and the Arts: Critical and Autobiographical Perspectives. New York: Continuum, 1995: 15-23.

Dorcey, Mary. “The Breath of History.” in Wee Girls: Women Writing from an Irish Perspective. Lizz Murphy (Ed.). North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000 [1996]:15.

Gilbert, Sandra M. e Susan Gubar. “Tradition and the Female Talent”. The Poetics of Gender. Org. Nancy K. Miller. New York Columbia University Press, 1986: 183-207.

Thinking points

·         How do gender and identity politics relate?

·         What have been the historical constraints of female creativity?

·         How are the issues of subjectivity and authorship addressed in the poems discussed?

Secondary/further reading

Butler, Judith. “1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire”. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2008 [1999]: 1-46.

Curti, Lidia. “Introduction: The Swing of Theory.” and “D’ for Difference: Gender, Genre, Writing.” in Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity and Representation.  London: Macmillan Press, 1998: 1-29.

Gilbert, Sandra M. e Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 [1979].

Lennon, Kathleen, "Feminist Perspectives on the Body", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/feminist-body/>.

WORKSHOP 2          RECASTING MYTHS in Contemporary British Short Fiction by Women WRITERS

Ana Raquel Fernandes

In 1928 Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, ‘women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time’ (50). Some of the most striking female mythical creations are products from Antiquity: the Graie, Medusa and the Gorgons, Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phèdre and Medea.

The aim of this seminar will be to discuss the use of female mythical figures in contemporary short fiction, focusing on the short story by A. S. Byatt, “Medusa’s Ankles” (in The Matisse Stories, 1993), and the short novel by Ali Smith, Girl meets Boy (2007). These authors recast Ancient myths, presenting different focuses and subverting tradition entirely.

Since most myths find expression in fiction, in particular, the novel (Armstrong 2005), but also the short story (Walker 1982), we will explore the common traits that make these narrative forms vehicles of myth.  

Primary texts

Byatt, A. S. “Medusa’s Ankles,” The Matisse Stories. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994: 1-28.

Smith, Ali. Girl Meets Boy. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007.

Thinking points

·           How do the texts selected question, challenge and subvert mythical creations?

·           In which way do they contribute to regenerate contemporary literature?

·           How are gender tensions depicted in both texts analyzed?

Secondary/further reading

Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. 2005. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006.

Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories. Selected Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000.

Gunn, Kirsty. “Here’s to second chances”. The Observer. Sunday 28 October 2007: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/oct/28/fiction.alismith>.

Honko, Lauri. “The Problem of Defining Myth”. In Dundes, Alan, ed. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984: 41-52.

Walker, Warren S. “From Raconteur to Writer: Oral Roots and Printed Leaves of Short Fiction”. In Aycock, Wendell M., ed. The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story, Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, Texas Tech University, 23-25 January: 13-26. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech Press, 1982.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

WORKSHOP 3          CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN’S WRITING: PUBLIC DISCOURSE, PRIVATE REFLECTION

Zuzanna Sanches

Irish literary studies have long struggled with the idea that there is no fine literature without the national question in return fed by the narratives of that fine literature. This, on its part, led to another fallacy of it being possible to escape the public sphere into the private preserve of either home or oneself. Ireland is a place where the domestic ideology has long been under the influence of the hegemonic national claims creating paradigms in which women played a secondary role. This seminar aims at exposing and understanding the marginal position of women in Irish writing and culture. As such, themes of identity formation, female corporeality, sex and personal freedoms will be analyzed. The moral values of the private/home front will be challenged by new visions of moral virtue and the ethic of care, especially daunting for the mother/daughter dyad and the omnipresent Irish myth of Mother (Ireland). The co-existence of mother and daughter in the “un/miswritten” story in Ireland will be read as “her” story through “her ethics” (recovering the myth of Jocasta and female otherness in her point of view). We will explore problems and contradictions like the above by reading work produced by women writers from Ireland and Northern Ireland.  

Primary texts

Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Demon Lover.” in Collected Stories. (ed. Angus Wilson). London and Sydney: Vintage, 1980: 661-666.

Madden, Deirdre. Hidden Symptoms. (fragments) London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988: 18-37, 48-52, 91-95.

Morrissy, Mary. Mother of Pearl. (fragments) London: Vintage, 1997: 3-26, 39-55, 133-139, 215-218.

 ---. “A Lazy Eye.” in A Lazy Eye. London: Vintage, 1996: 41-55.

Thinking points

·                    Can traditional plots reveal disruptive plots beneath?

·                    How did the conflict in Northern Ireland influence the construction of (Northern) Irish femininity and masculinity?

·                    How was female corporeality constructed in Ireland and how determining a role did motherhood (in myth and practice) play in women’s lives?

Secondary/further reading

Boland, Eavan. “Preface.” in Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2006: ix-xvi.

Bracken, Claire. “Becoming- Mother – Machine: The Event of Field Day Vols IV &V.” in Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives. Patricia Coughlan and Tina O’Toole (Eds.). Dublin: Carysfort Press. 2008: 223-244.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Feminist Family Romances” in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989: 125-161.

Kelleher, Margaret. “The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women’s Literary Studies.”  The Irish Review (1986), No. 30 (Spring - Summer), 2003: 82-94.

Walshe, Éibhear (Ed.). “Introduction:  Sex, Nation and Dissent.” in Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing. Cork: Cork University Press, 1997: 1-15.

WORKSHOP 4          INTRACTABLE BODIES: LUIZA NETO JORGE’S POETRY AND CINDY SHERMAN’S PHOTOGRAPHY

Diana Almeida

In the intersection between nature and culture, biology and consciousness, the body has always been a problematic realm. Since modernity women artists have focused on images of the body and reframed it as a site of resistance that escapes categorization and intellectual appropriation.

We will analyze the poem “O Ciclópico Acto,” [“The Cyclopic Act”] by the Portuguese writer Luiza Neto Jorge (1939-1989), first conceived as a “book-object” to be presented in a box with illustrations by Jorge Martins, and compare it with a selection of images by the U.S. photographer Cindy Sherman (1954-), namely from her 1990s series using prosthesis. We will parallel the strategies used in these verbal and visual texts to deconstruct the unitary gendered body, conceived as a metaphor for a larger political and conceptual order.

Primary texts

Verbal

Jorge, Luiza Neto. O Ciclópico Acto, poema para livro-objecto de Jorge Martins. Lisbon: Livraria-Galeria 111, 1972. / “O Ciclópico Acto,” Poesia (ed. Fernando Cabral Martins). Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1993, 215-221.

Visual

Sherman, Cindy. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

Thinking points

·           How is the subversive potential of the body depicted in the poem?

·           How is the physical dissolution presented in each of the texts?

·           How are the contemporary body politics commented upon in each of the texts?

 

Secondary/further reading

Burton, Johanna (ed.). Cindy Sherman. October Files 6. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Martelo, Rosa Maria. “Corpo, enunciação e identidade na poesia de Luiza Neto Jorge,” Cadernos de Literatura Comparada 2. Porto: Granito/Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa, FLUP, 2001, 35-47.

Nunes, José Ricardo. “’O Ciclópico Acto’: Algumas notas de leitura,” Relâmpago. Revista de Poesia 18. Abril 2006, 59-68.

Smith, Elizabeth A. T. “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001, 19-31.

WORKSHOP 5:                     THE TRUTH IN FAIRY TALES AND OTHER STORIES

Ana Raquel Fernandes

Diana Almeida

Zuzanna Sanches

            Fairy tales are cross-cultural narratives that have for centuries been close to women’s hearts, for they were the storytellers who connected with the daily adventures of the community and transmitted them to their children. Nonetheless this socialization tool many times bore repressive messages deemed to maintain the status quo. Since modernity women artists have been recreating the universe of the fairy tales, questioning the female role in traditional stories. At a theoretical level, feminist criticism posits the hypothesis of gender construction as “storytelling”, a performance of selves that, through repetition, generates an apparently autonomous and coherent identity.

            The analysis of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits and Paula Rego’s quasi-narrative sketches will be used to illuminate Judith Butler’s notion of identity. This exegetic dialogue will also lead us to revisit the texts and concepts studied throughout the workshop and elaborate a unifying, if open, synthesis.

Primary texts

Verbal

Butler, Judith. “Introduction”. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993: 1- Kahlo Retrospective. (eds. Martin-Gropius-Bau). Munich: Prestel, 2010: 52-57.

Kraus, Arnold. “Frida Kahlo: Pain as Life.” in Frida Kahlo Retrospective. (eds. Martin-Gropius-Bau). Munich: Prestel, 2010: 52-57.

Silva, Maria Arlete Alves da (Ed.) Paula Rego no Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito (CAMB). Text by João Miguel Fernandes Jorge. Oeiras: Câmara Municipal de Oeiras, Direcção Municipal de Desenvolvimento Social e Cultural, 2008: 2-12; 33.

Visual

Kahlo, Frida:  Henry Ford Hospital, 1932; The Broken Column, 1944. in Frida Kahlo Retrospective. (eds. Martin-Gropius-Bau). Munich: Prestel, 2010: 103, 147.

Rego, Paula: Baying, 1994; Snow White and her Stepmother, 1995; and Legend of Fire, 1997. McEwen, John. Paula Rego. 2^nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1997: 208-239.

Thinking points

·           To what extent do these paintings interact with the universe of fairy tales or other mythological texts?

·           What does the physical portrait or self-portrait of women tell us about female identity?

·           How can we relate these visual texts to Butler’s notion of identity?

Secondary/further reading

Cixous, Helen and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1994.

Horner, Avril, Angela Keane. (Eds). Body Matters. Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

----. Org. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. New York: Norton, 1996 [1985].

Janeway, Elizabeth, “Women’s Literature”, in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, Daniel Hoffman (Ed.), 342-395. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979.

Riviere, Joan. "Womanliness as Masquerade". In Female Experience: Three Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women. (eds. Joan Raphael-Leff, Rosine Jozef Perelberg). London: Routledge, 1997.

Whitford, Margaret. (Ed.). The Irigaray Reader: Luce Irigaray. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Note: The poems, short stories and excerpts of the novels will be made available to students on registration.