- Profesor: Sonja Frenzel
Rooms of Whose Own? Androgynous Writing Spaces
When Virginia Woolf claimed that women writers need a room of their own as well as financial independence, she drew attention to the different conditions under which men and women write and are acknowledged as writers. All the while, she further suggests, any writer also needs an androgynous mind to be able to fully inhabit their literary characters as well as literary worlds.
What has become of Woolf’s argument at the beginning of the 21st century? What do these insights mean for how wo/men write and are acknowledged as writers today?
In this seminar, we will be tackling these questions in historical and comparative perspective: We will be examining three essays – Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own (1929), Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), and Siri Hustvedt’s “Being a Man” (2006) – for their critical stance on a writer’s androgynous perspective. We will then turn towards two contemporary women writers’ accounts of their becoming a writer: Maggie Nelson’s autotheoretical explorations in The Argonauts (2015) and Awaeke Emezi’s epistolary memoir Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (2021). Pertinent topics for our explorations will be, among others, creativity and craft, writing scenes and self-knowledge.
This seminar also contains a creative writing component that will guide students in their explorations of writing as an androgynous practice.