Notes: Reading as a Writer: Feminist Compositions (Summer 2022) In this course we will get to play with all sorts of novel ways our literary forebears & contemporaries have approached the challenges of writing against the grain of social norms, understanding structural prejudice to be as much an impetus to originality as a set of prohibitive terms. Reading as writers, we will explore the stories of women & "others" as would-be authors trying to make themselves heard from the gaps & erasures of the archive. The standard for what constitutes literature in English has long been masculinised by design & its hegemony sustained by homosocial culture-producing industries. If, as Foucault says, such power is not monolithic, but at every moment “in play in little singular struggles, with local reversals, regional defeats & victories, provisional revenges,” how have women & other writers resisted, creating alternative narrative pathways? Understanding that patriarchy has no gender & taking “woman” as one of many viable non-hegemonic subject positions, this course is open to readers & writers of all subjectivities. If “feminist” speaks to a shared recalcitrance in the face of patriarchal skulduggery, how have the writers who have come before us & live alongside us today gone about challenging norms of gender, race & class, generating new systems of knowledge through their writing? How do we write ourselves into the world, with all our incoherencies & dissonances, as individuals & as part of a collective? How do we make & how are we made by our circumstances? Taking a cross-section of pluralised, politicised & personalised ways of writing from the past decades, all foregrounding the importance of the testimony of experience, we will explore diverse texts across various genres: cultish experimental writers like Diane di Prima, Mary Gaitskill, Chris Kraus & Dodie Bellamy; acclaimed & emerging voices such as Juliet Jacques, Amia Srinivasan & Natasha Brown; & more established heterodox writers including Lucille Clifton, Louise Erdich, Rachel Cusk, Diana Evans, Nell Dunn, Jacqueline Rose & Rebecca Solnit.