Literature Core | Bad Girls: Unruly, Cruel, Nasty Women in Literature, Film and Popular Culture | Spring 2023

Course Description

“Bad Girls: Unruly, Cruel, Nasty Women in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture” examines discourses of femininity in literature, film, and popular culture, paying particular attention to the ways that performances of female rebellion stretch, bend, or challenge dominant understandings of what it means to be female in historical and contemporary American culture. How, this course asks, does female embodiment represent a threat to the social order? How do literature and popular culture function as a site for forming and constructing gendered understandings of race, class, nationality, and sexuality? 

As a Literature Core course, this class has a primary objective to introduce you to “sophisticated college-level literary analysis and to a range of texts.” You’ll notice as you review this syllabus that our range of texts includes: poetry, novels, film, TV, Biblical texts, community publications, zines, and secondary literature. You’ll have ample opportunities to develop and practice close reading and analytical strategies individually and in community with others in this course.

Course Materials

  • Excerpts from the Bible (Adam & Eve, Lillith) (Antiquity | Religious Texts) 

  • “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892 | Short Story)

  • Schitt’s Creek  (2015-2020 | TV Series) 

  • Homeland (2011 - 2020 | TV Series)

  • Selections from Sara Ahmed’s work (~2010 | Theory)

  • “Uses of Anger” by Audre Lorde (1981 | Essay)

  • Riot Grrrls zines (c. 1990s | Zines)

  • SisterSerpents zines (c. 1990s | Zines) 

  • Selections from Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (2020 | Essays)

  • Selections from My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Sandra Cisneros (1987 | Poetry)

  • Selections from Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (2020 | Poetry)

  • Selections from The New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First Century US Television by Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman (2022 | Theory)

  • A Zine About Analyzing Literature for Lit Core at BC by Noël Ingram (2022 | Zine) 

  • With Teeth by Kristen Arnett (2021 | Novel)

  • Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012 | Novel) 

  • Gone Girl (2014 | Film) 

  • Nox by Anne Carson (2010 | Poetry)

  • Student choice of novel (200-400 pages) for the course's second half.

Supporting Close Reading and Literary Analysis 

I created this zine for students in my course as a primer on the basics of literary analysis. I would reference this zine in class, as well as direct students to this work, to support their developing mastery of literary analysis. Additionally, this zine served as an early example for students of the zine form itself— which they explored in greater detail later on during the semester.

Deliverables

  • 4 A's Literary Analysis

    Part of being engaged in this class means coming to the class having done the reading, ready to share your thoughts with our community. To help support you in this work, you’ll have a smaller “class discussion prep” assignment to complete for each day we have assigned reading. This takes the form of short, analytical reading responses, approximately 5-7 sentences in length each. These will also give you ample practice at close reading, a key learning outcome of Literature Core, as well as help you to build the textual analysis skills you’ll need to be successful on your final project.

    4 A's Protocol

  • Blips

    Short pieces of literary analysis, 500-700 words in length.

    Blips Instructions

  • Metacognitive Letters

    Three different reflective pieces where you respond in writing to the work that you’ve done in the course so far. Each piece is approximately 500-1000 words in length.

    Metacognitive Letters Instructions

  • Literary Analysis Final Project

    A 5-7 page (1,700 - 2,400 words) literary analysis essay on a novel of your choice that you read in the second half of the semester, accompanied by a literary analysis zine. Your work for this project is broken down into several smaller deliverables designed to set you up for success in this project, including a proposal, storyboards, blip, draft, and finally, your final literary analysis essay and final zine. This document will help you backwards plan this project.

    Final Project Description

  • My Class with Their Zines

    My Literature Core students with their final zines on the last day of class.

  • Students' Zines

    A closer view of the zines my students created as part of their final project.