From contributor Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick: Julie invites posts and comments in response to her provocation —
I wonder how many of us teach modernist women writers in a course dedicated to women writers solely and how many of teach women writers alongside of their male counterparts in a survey or seminar format. I teach a course on modernist women writers (and contemporary women writers) and feminist theory every year–I feel fortunate that there’s a demand from the students, and our various majors and minors support such a class. But I also teach modernist women writers with the modernist men in a survey course that is formatted like a seminar, and this class is particularly fascinating to me in that the course is designed to promote dialogue about the men and women of modernism among the students. We purposely consider the dynamics inherent in canoncity, and we consider concepts from women’s studies in our framing of the authors and their works. Specifically, we think about “intersectionality,” “positionality,” and feminist “recovery” work in relation to how we approach, understand, and value texts by modernist men and women. I’ve been reworking this approach over the years, thanks to the influence of New Modernist Studies. In short, I’m curious about *how* we approach women writers in fairly traditional course offerings, as well as how students are introduced to them to begin with on different campuses.