A New Eve: Women, Myth, and Power

The New Eve is a distinctly modern creation, a radical and arresting re-imagining of her mythical original, the first woman venerated as the mother of humankind and blamed for its fallen humanity. We read the literary works of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Nella Larsen, James Joyce) and directors (e.g., Fritz Lang, Jane Campion) alongside psychoanalytic case studies and contemporary works of feminist, critical race, and trans theory to think anew Freud's notoriously unanswered question, what does a woman want. No prior knowledge of critical theory is required.