Race, Gender, and Sexuality (382-0-25)
Topic
Doppelgangers/Dark Doubles: Race & Gender in the 1
Instructors
Elizabeth Mary Winter
Meeting Info
University Library 3322: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
Topic: Doppelgangers and Dark Doubles: Race and Gender in the 19th century Atlantic.
Today, evil twins, alter egos and doppelgängers are fodder for soap operas and sci-fi dramas. In this course, we'll trace the trope of the double back to the nineteenth-century, when doubles proliferated in popular culture. (Think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.) We'll use the trope of the double to question the hardening of gender roles and racial categories in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Together, we'll identify the distinct modes of masculinity, femininity and domesticity presented by the twinned characters in novels like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures and ask how they uphold or destabilize ideas about "traditional" masculinity and femininity. Pairing novels from England, the U.S. and the Caribbean with readings by essential feminist critics and historians like Saidiya Hartman, Gayatri Spivak, and Anne McClintock, we'll contemplate how gender and racial categories emerge in ways that are entangled and intertwined. We'll consider what these texts can tell us about the relations between the English metropole, its colonies, and the distant- or deeply intimate and interdependent- bonds between them. Throughout the course, we'll also reflect on what contemporary representations of this world, like Bridgerton, have to say about our current understandings of these categories and how they continue to shape our world today.
Class Materials (Required)
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole (0140439021), The Woman of Colour (9781551111766 ), Jane Eyre, Pudd'nhead Wilson (0393925358). Other materials will be provided on Canvas
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area