Bibliographies
Women, Science, and Nature
From: Margo Tamez-Hrabovsky <Margo.Tamezhrabovsky@pima.edu>
Date: October 13, 2004
Dear friends,
A colleague of mine is soliciting suggestions for a new course she is developing for senior level English majors. I would be grateful for your contributions. The quoted piece, below, is her description of her process thus far...
thanks!
Margo Tamez
"My title for teaching my course this time is Women, Science, and Nature (or something less boring, maybe), so I'm trying to get into the class a strong sense of how science comes between women and nature/their own nature, as well as how it facilitates our knowing our world and selves (maybe!). I'll do Hogan's "The Kill Hole" (poses lots of good questions) and maybe some other selections from her essays, Scheibinger's history of women in science (students like it), and Harding's Is Science Multicultural? (gets them into academic language and theory, the conjunction of feminism and multicultural and postcolonial thinking, etc.), and maybe a couple of chapters from Rose's Love, Power, and Knowledge (theoretical critique of science--British and American). I will require Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and will pick utopia(s), magical realism/science fiction by women--multicultural, of course. I taught Gilman, Butler, and Piercy last time. I'd like more suggestions in this last category.
I'll look at your book too, of course!!!
I'd like the students to think not only on a national level, but also on the local and international levels, since the national level leaves out the personal and universal."
From: ellen arnold <earnold47@yahoo.com>
Date: October 13, 2004
I would recommend Ursula LeGuin's ALWAYS COMING HOME--it is a fascinating (if lengthy) novel that would work very well with the questions/associations raised in the course. It is framed as an "archeological" study of the future and contrasts two very different cultures--one geared toward power and technology, the others towards balance and more earth-centered uses of technology.
From: "Karla M. Armbruster" <armbruka@webster.edu>
Date: October 13, 2004
I have found Evelyn Fox Keller's work in this area really helpful: A Feeling for the Organism (a biography of scientist Barbara McClintock) and the more theoretical Reflections on Gender and Science. (She also wrote Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.)
Margaret Atwood's Surfacing would probably fit into her last category.
Karla
----------------------------------------------------------------
Karla Armbruster
Associate Professor
Department of English
Webster University
470 East Lockwood
St. Louis, MO 63119
314-961-2660. ext. 7577
FAX: 314-968-7173
armbruka@webster.edu
From: ellen arnold <earnold47@yahoo.com>
Date: October 13, 2004
Hogan's novel SOLAR STORMS would work well too. As I have argued in a critical essay , SS offers a perspective that blends and balances epistemologies (scientific/reductionist and participatory) rather than opposing them. It pairs well with Atwood's SURFACING, also, which takes up some of the same issues but differently.
From: "Patterson, Jerry Danny" <patte2dj@cmich.edu>
Date: October 13, 2004
I'm currently enjoying an engaged response from my students to Rachel Carson's *The Edge of the Sea* as well as to Carson's story, as told by Linda Lear in her biography. So I can imagine that having students read either *The Edge of the Sea* or *Silent Spring* together with relevant chapters from Lear would give students much to think about with regard to "Women, Science, and Nature."
Daniel Patterson
Department of English Language and Literature
Central Michigan University
Mount Pleasant, Michigan 48859
989.774.2660