Impartido por Marek Blaszak (University of Opole) y organizado por el Departamento de Filología Española, Moderna y Clásica 

Ramon Llull, Aula 6

Marek Blaszak, del Institute of English Philology (University of Opole, Poland) nos ofrece su seminario de investigación cuya sesión está validada como actividad de formación específica ("Seminari de Recerca") por la Comisión Académica del Programa de Doctorado de Filología y Filosofía. A continuación se sigue una descripción del mismo.

The analysis and interpretation of British and American literature with feminist and gender theories in mind have been very systematic and fruitful in the past few decades. The Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing is an interesting case in the context of feminist and gender studies. Her first fictional heroine in the novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) is a strong and imperious white woman living in a British African colony in the 1940s, who transforms from an overt racist into a person who becomes kind to and even develops an intimate relationship with her black manservant to the indignation of the local white community. In her most valued novel The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing challenged not only the conventional narrative structure, but also explored women’s liberation movement and their preoccupation with work, politics and love. In her advanced age, however, the writer came to criticize radical feminism as monstrous and rose in the defence of men. When she was 88 years old she wrote The Cleft (2007), a kind of a myth of the beginning of the human race, which shows that – in the long run – life and evolution of mankind is not possible in an all-female tribe of the title clefts who are idle, selfish and cruel. Without men they are incomplete and lose their ability to proliferate; thus, it is only after they join the neighbouring community of males that life can develop.

The subject of this session is the short story “A Woman on a Roof” (1963) which is set in London in the early 1960s. This temporal setting corresponds to the second phase of modern feminism. Some of the questions to be considered in the class include the reactions of the three male protagonists to the situation presented in the story, and the response of the female protagonist; differences in the reactions of the men depending on their age, marital status and life experience; the stereotype of male aggression and female sexuality; the image of the submissive woman in the story; the role of the (social) class component; the use of the third-person point of view of the selective omniscient type.

 

Event date: 15/04/2016

Publication date: Tue Jul 12 15:43:00 CEST 2016