Writing (with) literature is an adventurous practice, taking a writer
through the depths and to the heights of creativity and craft, yet
always anticipating the sense of an ending. The suspense of such
adventurous anticipation is embodied most ingeniously in the figure of
Penelope: yet, while she is patiently waiting, in Homer's epos, for her
husband's return to Ithaka, she is also a woman who can fend for
herself.
When James Joyce concludes his modernist masterpiece Ulysses
with a chapter dedicated to Leopold Bloom’s wife Molly and titled
"Penelope", this is not only his final gesture towards the mythological
underpinnings of his work. Further to this, Molly Bloom’s stream of
consciousness flows through its own heights and depths, all the while
offering both a gendered critique of the novel’s adventurous plot and a
cathartic moment in the reading experience.
Almost one hundred
years later, the adventures of Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness
resonate forcefully in Lucy Ellmann's congenial Ducks, Newburyport,
which comes as an extensive, 1038-page, one-sentence monologue. Set in
the early hours of the morning, when a wife and mother of four is baking
cinnamon rolls to add to the family income, this book at once bears no
resemblance at all and every resemblance possible to "Penelope". Evoking
an explicit feminist agenda, the unnamed narrator becomes Everywoman,
like Molly Bloom, and her insights may be judged the first encyclopedic
narrative by a woman author, comparable to Joyce’s Ulysses.
In this seminar, we will explore both texts – ”Penelope” and Ducks, Newburyport
– for their women's stories adventures: for their renderings of
waiting, for the heights and depths of their modernist stream of
consciousness, for their articulations of womanhood, motherhood, and
gender politics, as well as for their all-encompassing commentaries on
life, death, and everything in-between.
Based on the premises of
artistic research, we will respond to these works in reading and writing
with literature, that is: by creatively writing our own
literary pieces in response to our reading experiences. Reflecting on
the adventures of our own writing processes, we will bring together
methods of genetic criticism with contemporary theories of craft and
creativity.
This seminar contains a creative
writing component: in our creative writing responses to "Penelope" and
"Ducks, Newburyport", we will be exploring Stream of Consciousness
techniques as well as the writerly processes of writing and re-writing.
This
seminar requires students to complete self-study assignments on moodle
and to participate in regular video conference sessions on webex.