The Adventure of Writing (With) Literature

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.