Professor Mary Evans, COL.5.04I

MSc Gender and MSc Gender, Media and Culture. The course is also available as an outside option where regulations permit.

The course will cover the following topics:

1. A review of various accounts of individual 'stories', accounts from which various forms of 'theory' have been developed. Amongst these accounts might be Freud's account of Dora, Carolyn Steedman's memoir of her mother.
2. The modern 'self' of women; the ways in which women have written their history, had history written about them and how those narratives have been a crucial part of the modern and its understanding of the individual.
3. The question of the 'who' in narrative; the literature on the recovery of the unknown, a form of recovery which has formed a considerable tradition (from Rowbotham to Spivak) in feminist literature, whilst that very recovery carries with it questions about power, messages received and lost and a form of reading which invites what has been described as the 'Great Story'. This part of the course will consider the subject of the imposition of meaning on individual acts and memories and the relationship between individual and collective subjectivity.
4. A review of the methods and the locations of the writing of auto/biography.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

One 1,500 word essay.

Adriana Cavarero Relating Narratives: Storytelling and selfhood (London, Routledge, 2000); Michel Foucault Technologies of the Self (London, Tavistock, 1988); Leigh Gillmore Autobiographics (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,1994); Audre Lorde Zami, A New Spelling of my Name (London, Pandora, 1996); Susannah Radstone The Sexual Politics of Time (London, Routledge, 2007); Jean Paul Sartre Words (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Reading Autobiography ( Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Liz Stanley The Auto/biographical I (Manchester, M.U.P., 1992; Carolyn Steedman Landscape for a Good Woman (London, Virago, 1986).

One 4,000 word essay (100%).