Destiny and Desire

In the fall of 1984, Barnard College's new freshman humanities offering included a cluster of four seminars with a double feminist aim: to counter traditional western humanities by submitting canonical texts to different modes of analysis, and to fill silences in our colleagues' syllabi with the voices of important women authors, critics, historians, and scientists. A model for both ways in which feminist scholars want to affect the curriculum, Destiny and Desire: Women in Literature and Culture billed itself in the college catalogue as an investigation of the ways in which women's experience has been imagined in literature and constructed in culture and society. The Barnard catalogue described the contours of the cluster as follows

Art · Destiny (ISS module · Digital humanities · Humanities · Medical education · Medical humanities · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Engineering · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Medicine · Publishing and Scholarly Communication