Judith Fetterley
The English Department's new Ph.D. program in "Writing, Teaching and Criticism" offers various spaces within which students interested in feminist research can pursue their inquiries. Several members of the department have significant commitments to feminist scholarship, in particular to the following issues: feminist theory as it is articulated within the field of English studies and the application of feminist theory to the practices of composition, feminist poetics, feminist literary history and feminist pedagogy.
Organized around the following curricular categories - Writing in History, Writing Theory and Practice, Rhetoric and Composition, Critical Theory and Practice, Teaching Theory and Practice and Language Theory - the program emphasizes the interrelatedness of several key areas of English studies. Within these categories and at the points of their intersection, faculty representing a variety of feminisms engage in scholarship and critique.
Theory, Poetry, and Composition
For example, theorist Rosemary Hennessy (Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse) in her teaching and writing articulates the relation of the marxist feminist tradition to the postmodern challenges to the subject of feminism, while Teresa Ebert's courses and publications reflect her theoretical interests in engaging feminism in a critical encounter with poststructuralism, marxism and cultural politics. Performance artiest and poet Judith Johnson (her latest book, The Ice Lizard Poems, 1977-88) teaches such courses as Theories of Creativity and Poetics and Literary Practice and has a wide range of theoretical interests, including feminist poetics, feminist narrative theory and feminist approaches to myth. Composition specialists Lil Brannon and Cy Knoblauch (Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy) critique American educational policy from a position of concern for teachers, most of whom are women and most of whom work in a system where policy decisions are made by administrators, the University research establishment and the testing/textbook industry.
Literary History
In the area of literary history, the program's commitment to foregrounding the politics of English studies and to problematizing such concepts as canon and period makes feminist inquiry and research particularly appropriate. Several faculty bring a feminist perspective to bear on the study of American literature. Specific interests include women's slave narratives (Jennifer Fleischner), regionalism (Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader), turn-of-the century "lost" texts (Diva Daims, Novels in English by Women 1891-1920), southern women writers (Joan Schulz), and women playwrights (Judith Barlow, Plays by Women: The Early Years).
The Renaissance offers another focus for feminist research with Martha Rozett (The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy) examining how students read their own gendered, class and cultural biases into Shakespeare, and Sandra Fischer (Econolingua) exploring the mechanisms by which the language of Renaissance drama contributes to maintaining a patriarchal system of social valuation.
Feminist Pedagogy
The Ph.D. program emphasizes teaching, and faculty within the program are committed to a focus on teaching theory and practice that includes issues connected with feminist pedagogy. The internship required of all doctoral students provides as additional opportunity for those interested in feminist teaching to work with faculty who share those interests.