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jrizzo's picture

The other Jessica is the other Simone

My sister feminist icon is also Simone de Beauvoir.  I've been looking into the French/Existentialist feminism and I'm completely intrigued.  I think The Second Sex would be a great place to start, but we could also look at de Beauvoir's fiction, or the work of other artists working out of the same place... though I wouldn't be able to name any other names just yet.  I think it's very valuable to be able to study a writer's art, as well as her non-fiction. I also very much enjoyed Cixous, and at first I thought it might be nice to do a lot of de Beauvoir-esque work and Cixous-esque work together, since they're sort of from the same world, but I'm realizing that since Cixous comes out of postmodernism with all these fascinating ideas about tearing down what's been established, I think I would prefer to first see what has been established, and given the varying levels of experience in the class, I think it would be a good idea to start a little farther back .

 Other than that, I'd like to read literature, "feminist texts," learning why we might identify something as a feminist novel or play, etc.  But I think it would also be a great experience to take an author traditionally bashed as a sexist, a D.H. Lawrence or someone (though I've never been able to figure out where the sexism is in his work) and give a feminist reading... whatever that means. 

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