Class description: (Un)Common Reading: Mercy

(Un)common Reading: Mercy

When controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin’s first fictional book was released in 1991, it was reviewed in the New York Times as “declaring war on men.” Perhaps that review was with good reason considering that the main character in the book, Andrea, tells a graphic story of a life of sexual abuse to explain while she now kills men. Though fictional, the book has been tagged as autobiographical, a property which Dworkin acknowledged shortly before her death.

The shocking language, graphic representations, and impassioned cries for freedom of slave narratives often frequent literature courses in high school and college – but Dworkin has written a book similar in style and substance about what she sees as the continued enslavement of women through sex subordination generally and sexual violence specifically. Using shock to make the invisible sexual violence of the world visible, Dworkin takes a very different approach to gender rights advocacy than either feminist theorists in academia or the feminist movement in the United States.

This one-credit course is centered around Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy, with short supplementary readings from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beloved, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and My Bondage and My Freedom. Weekly discussions will center on the literary style, advocacy strategy, politics, and context of this controversial book, with brief lectures setting the scene for each part of the book.

Students uncomfortable with graphic sexual content and/or graphic sexual discussions should not enroll in this course.

Students will be expected to participate in discussions about parts of the book over the course of the semester, engage the (limited) supplemental readings, and contribute at least one post to the class blog over the course of the semester (anonymously, of course). The class blog will be an attempt to document the experiences of college students engaging with Dworkin’s Mercy in a similar, visceral, immediate sense as the narrator of Mercy accounts for her (tragic) life experiences.