AFST 20111 - Chicago in Words

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

Africana Studies

Description:

Early twentieth-century Chicago was famous for its railways and stockyards, jazz and gangsters. The city saw the creation of great industrial fortunes and the birth in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World. The literature taken up in this class brings the dynamic contradictions of the Chicago experience to life. We will look at work by Jane Addams, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Ward, and Richard Wright, covering a range of literary expression from impassioned journalism, to poetry, novels, and drama. We will consider the relation of modernism to realism. We will look at the ways in which Chicago capitalism altered nature, challenged traditional forms of identity, and created new forms of urban community. We will spend a week exploring Chicago's jazz and blues, while we will also look at the 1932 gangster film Scarface, screenplay by Chicago journalist and Oscar winner Ben Hecht. Chicago is a city of tremendous vitality and shocking brutality that has reinvented itself time and again, and the writers we will read have taken up this task of urban invention with a shared urgency and a wide range of voices. Course requirements: active class participation, short response papers, creative responses (poems), a class presentation of a scene from Big White Fog by Theodore Ward, and an 8-10 page paper. Many "contemporary fiction" classes conclude with works published around the time that you were born in the mid-to-late 1980s. This course focuses on novels published during the decade in which you are living and examines the interpretive difficulties raised by such works. Without being able to rely on an established history of scholarly criticism or their place among the so-called "great books" of civilization, the reader of contemporary novels must actively consider why these works are worth studying as well as how they function. The major aims of this course are to introduce you to these exciting novels and to provide you with the critical and interpretive framework for determining what contemporary literature is and why it matters. We will focus on eight novels and novellas examining the intersections between self and society and between literary art and the popular cultures of film, television, hip-hop, rock, and comic books. Readings include novels and novellas by Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, David Markson, and Toni Morrison. The course also includes a screening of the film adaptation of Foer's Everything is Illuminated. Because this course is intended for non-majors, each unit will include introductions to the basic tools of literary study including close reading, how to write a literary argument, how to incorporate secondary criticism and theory, and the basic principles of film and television. Course requirements include two 5-7 page papers and one 7-10 page paper.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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