TACKLING INEQUALITIES BUILDING A HEALTHIER LITERATURE CURRICULUM THROUGH

TACKLING INEQUALITIES: BUILDING A ‘HEALTHIER’ LITERATURE CURRICULUM THROUGH FEMINIST REFLEXIVITY Aimee Merrydew Ph. D Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in English Literature Twitter: a_merrydew Email: a. j. merrydew@keele. ac. uk

Outline of presentation • Summarise my understanding of feminist pedagogy • Identify issues surrounding the Western literary canon • Reflect on an example of feminist pedagogy in practice

Feminist pedagogy • Experiential knowledge and reflexivity • Non-hierarchical teacher-student relationships • Teaching and learning as communal activism

The Western literary canon

T. S. Eliot Pablo Neruda Albert Camus Mikhail Bulgakov Virgil Sophocles Homer Faulkner Franz Kafka Lope de Vega Ovid Goethe Shakespeare Jane Austen Victor Hugo Charles Baudelaire Proust Samuel Beckett François Rabelais Michel de Montaigne Giovanni Boccaccio Dostoyevsky Euripides Jorge Luis Borges Vladimir Nabokov Tolstoy Emily Dickinson Milton Joyce Samuel Johnson Wordsworth Dickens Walt Whitman Gustave Flaubert Freud Dante Geoffrey Chaucer Voltaire Honoré de Balzac Ivan Turgenev Horace Miguel de Cervantes Aristophanes Aeschylus Virginia Woolf Arthur Rimbaud Alexander Pushkin Herman Melville Henrik Ibsen Chekhov George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans Thomas Mann Fernando Pessoa

Feminist intervention… I create teaching materials that encourage students: 1. To map systems of oppression in canonical texts 2. To reflect on their own positions and how they impact their experiences in the classroom and wider society

The Great Gatsby (1925)

What evidence is there that Gatsby is white?

‘Fitzgerald’s extravagant protagonist and antihero Jay Gatsby is the manifestation of his creator’s deep-seated apprehensions concerning miscegenation’ (Carlyle van Thompson, 2004: 76).

Whiteness, in countries such as the UK and US, is framed as the standard, default, and unspoken position to which racial minorities are compared (see, for example, Ahmed 2007)

Conclusion… • Reflecting on ‘whiteness’ is necessary to expose and disrupt white power and privilege in the Literature curriculum and wider society • Reflecting on systems of oppression (e. g. ‘whiteness’ and white supremacy) as feminists can help to build a ‘healthier’ Literature curriculum by challenging social inequalities in canonical texts and society