353 Scandinavian Women Writers

Interaction between literature and society in fiction written by women. Readings range from 13th-century Icelandic sagas to works by contemporary authors. Readings and discussions in English.

United under the linked themes of memory and the construction of an imagined past, the fictional texts we will read this quarter will explore the landscape and interiors of Scandinavian women's experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will read the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel's Alberte og Jakob (1926), the Danish writer Isak Dinesen's (pseudonym for Karen Blixen) Out of Africa (1937), and the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman's Blackwater (1996), as well as a number of short prose texts by other Scandinavian writers, with an eye to exploring how the topographies they create function in the texts. Building on ideas originally propounded by Virginia Woolf in her ubiquitous work A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she argues that questions of economics, personal autonomy, and the occupation of a particular type of space are inextricably linked to the successful production of literature, we will in this class examine how the literary construction of space by women writers changes over time, as well as how those spaces are inflected both in terms of class, gender, and in some instances race.