The course focuses on the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, with an emphasis on short stories and novels written by British and Anglophone women writers of the 20th and 21st centuries (such as Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Jeanette Winterson). It explores how these writers draw upon key philosophical assumptions and narrative experiments of postmodernism in their texts to compose contemporary narratives, myths, and theories surrounding female subjectivity, sexuality, gender identity, and social status, often adopting a comparative and intertextual approach (as, for example, in rewritings of myths and fairy tales). Specifically, the course examines postmodern literary and theoretical approaches to the concept of identity. Through these, the course analyzes the concept of femininity and its ideological, psychological, and social construction. The course also focuses on postmodernism as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon, which has led to new perspectives on writing, reading, and textuality, as well as their relationship to the concepts of reality, truth, and the world. It highlights how these ideas were adopted and developed by feminist writers and theorists and are still used today as strategies of resistance against dominant representations of women’s identities. In this context, issues such as the organization and structure of the text, language, images, references, intertextuality, and various other narrative and stylistic techniques are examined in detail.
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