THE SEMINAR
Ever since the advent of the European Renaissance in the fifteenth century, awakening of women to discriminations and disadvantages attached to their sex has been on the rise resulting in their revolutionary writings ranging from the hiographical to the fictional. This awakening, linked as it was with the Renaissance ideas of humanism and liberalism, spread outside Europe through the imperial efforts of introducing new education of modern science and human rights in their colonies in Asia and Africa. These very new ideas of secularism and democratic rights finally led to the end of the empires. By the middle of the twentieth century all the European empires had been overthrown. But the process of modernisation the empires had initiated continued resulting in increasing emancipation of women, their awareness of their rights and their expression finally in their writings in prose and verse. Thus from America to Australia, Germany to Japan, England to India, France to Africa there has emerged in the last 500 years a vast body of women's writing which is calling for a recast of literary canons and a re-evaluation of critical norms. Much of the world's literature has been dominated by a canon that nearly dismissed women's writing more than two centuries ago. The counter-canons that have emerged as the result of this exclusion have helped to establish women's writing in mainstream culture, but still in some ways fail to acknowledge women's literature coming from non-white countries. Women's writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly interest relatively recently. In the West, the second wave of feminism prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women's history and women's writing, developed in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. This seminar is an attempt to highlight some of the works produced by women globally over the ages especially the growth in women's writing in the past fifty years i.e. post China war. The Seminar aims to acknowledge the contribution and recognition of the emerging voice of Women in the arena of literature during the last few centuries, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Women writers across the globe have made their distinctive mark, with their own perception of life be it feminine, or Feminist or female.
The seminar will discuss interwoven theoretical, artistic, and historical issues in the literature produced by women worldwide. We will examine elements that comprise a tradition of women's literature across generic, cultural, and historical boundaries, noting how social constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality have shaped the writers, their work, as well as readerly/critical response. How have these writers' historical and cultural locations helped determine their artistic and theoretical agendas? How do we read their works and what is the role of audience? The seminar aims to draw critical attention to the wide spectrum of women writers across the world and seeks to both address and celebrate the global outlook of contemporary women’s writing. Not only the teachers, research scholars and students would benefit from such an academic enterprise but the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find the proceedings intellectually stimulating. |
