32115

SoSe 18: The Sylvia Plath Effect: Literary Celebrity and Mental Illness

Talel Ben Jemia

Information for students

First session in room 201, all others in 340.

Comments

The writing of Sylvia Plath, both her prose and poetry, will provide an entry point into different discourses surrounding women’s writing post WWII. Plath’s corpus will be read alongside, and at times, in contrast with other writers and (proto)feminist voices of the 1950s and 1960s. Her confessional and autobiographical writing invites comparisons but also greatly differs from contemporaries such as Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood and Betty Friedan. This seminar will map and contextualize these writer’s perspectives and interventions into the shifting but also static gender roles of this period. ----- The second central topic of this seminar will be the literary tradition of female writers engaging with their roles as creatives and the recurring struggle with mental illness. Particularly in Plath’s case, the trope of the female writer suffering from depression and “hysteria” have profoundly shaped her legacy and literary celebrity. Psychoanalytical and feminist theories and interpretations of women’s writing will be critically examined in this seminar. ----- Preliminary Syllabus: Sylvia Plath: - The Bell Jar (1963), - Selected Poems from Ariel (1965) and The Colossus and other Poems (1960), - Selected Stories from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977). Other Writers: Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899); Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (1969); Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation (1994); Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1999). close