A course I designed / University of Miami
BAD WOMENIN MEDIEVAL AND
EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
ENG 106 · English Composition II
Spring 2021, Fall 2021
I designed this course to ask students to test scholarly interpretations of transgressive female characters against their own close readings, and to develop original, defensible claims.
Who gets to decide what makes a “bad woman”?
When reading premodern texts, students often feel disempowered, deferring to the authority of scholars and instructors. I designed this course around a unifying question about its central female characters: were they merely hollow caricatures of “bad women” being denigrated by male authors, as scholarship has often maintained, or might their portrayals lend themselves to more capacious readings?
The question gave students a way to approach sophisticated texts through an argument they could investigate for themselves.
The Wife of Bath and Lady Macbeth
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is often interpreted as a caricature of the lustful, domineering wife, who stitches her speech together from misrepresentations of Biblical verses and antifeminist tracts. To complicate students’ initial conceptions of figures such as the Wife of Bath and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I assigned criticism that offered alternative ways of reading them.
Rather than offering my own verdict on these competing interpretations, I acted as a provocateur. I prompted students to weigh conflicting scholarly evidence against their own readings of the primary texts and to craft original, defensible claims.
Reading women through women’s writing
Students also used later female-authored works, including poetry by Dickinson and Angelou, as interpretive lenses for these transgressive characters. Putting texts in dialogue across time periods gave them a way to refine their comparative writing and generate original insights.
As a composition course, this work joined close reading to thesis-driven argument: students reassessed familiar portrayals, tested scholarly consensus, and developed interpretations grounded in textual evidence.
A student’s perspective
Selected course evaluation“The most valuable material that was taught to me in this course was the different ideas that we engaged with/discussed as a class. I definitely think they helped my critical thinking skills, as well as challenged my views.”
University of Miami · Spring 2021
Teaching & mentorship
MORE FROM
THE CLASSROOM.
My teaching brings literary analysis into conversation with students’ own questions, from interpretations of premodern women to contemporary environmental debates.
Explore my teachingTeaching, scholarship & academic service
Birmingham, Alabama
LET’S TALK.
For teaching, mentorship, and scholarly conversation.
sms512@miami.edu