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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Modernism among writers began in the second half of the nineteenth century and continued through perhaps World War II; we shall concentrate on fiction from around the 1920s, by such writers as Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Toomer, Cather, and Stein. Modernism tends to be difficult and elitist, though such writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway tried to make popular careers out of its methods. Its reception has always been controversial and paradoxical: modernism either unleashes revolutionary thinking or displaces it (and either alternative may be its value); it either allows expression to repressed forms of sexuality or re-represses them; it either registers new racial realities or is specifically designed to keep racial structures in place. In this tutorial we shall address both American modernist fiction and its reception, and thus will conduct a continuing investigation of the relation of obscure meaning and imputed historical significance.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
Critics reading minority writing often focus on its thematic--i.e., sociological--content. Such literature is usually presumed to be inseparable from the "identity"/body of the writer and read as autobiographical, ethnographic, representational, exotic. At the other end of the spectrum, avant-garde writing is seen to concern itself "purely" with formal questions, divorced from the socio-historical (and certainly not sullied by the taint of race). In the critical realm we currently inhabit, in which "race" is opposed to the "avant-garde," an experimental minority writer can indeed seem an oxymoron. In this class we will closely read recent work by Asian American, African American, Native American and Latino/a writers which challenges preconceptions about ethnic literature, avant-garde writing, genre categorization, among other things. The writing done by these mostly young, mostly urban, poets and fiction writers is some of the most exciting being written in the United States today; their texts push the boundaries of aesthetic form while simultaneously engaging questions of culture, politics, and history. Reading them forces us to re-think our received notions about literature. Authors to be read include Will Alexander, Sherwin Bitsui, Monica de la Torre, Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, Tao Lin, Ed Roberson, James Thomas Stevens, Roberto Tejada, and Edwin Torres.
Prerequisite:
Those taking this as an English class must have previously taken a 100-level English course
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3.00 Credits
This course is not an introduction to Asian American history or Asian American literature. Rather, it surveys the first five decades of an interdisciplinary academic field, Asian American Studies, to understand its development, intellectual and political concerns, and future prospects. Originating in student movements that saw themselves in solidarity with revolutionary forces around the world and in the U.S., Asian American Studies has become an established part of the curriculum in leading colleges and universities around the country. How did that happen? What was gained, and what was lost? How have the intellectual frameworks and objectives of the field shifted over time? In this course, we'll pursue an intellectual and institutional history of the field, with a special focus on Asian American literary and cultural studies. We won't shy away from some of the most vexing questions animating contemporary debates in the field: are the key ideas out of which it originated--its concept of "Asian America," its agenda for rethinking the social function of higher education--even recognizable today? Does "Asian American" continue to be a socially and politically useful category? Can ethnic studies continue to be a transformative force within higher education, or has it merely extended the reach of a structure it once sought to supplant? The tutorial format will allow us to accommodate students with or without prior knowledge of Asian American issues.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
What do we mean by "nature"? How do we understand the relationships between "nature" and "culture"? In this course we will examine how various American writers have attempted to render conceptions of "nature" in literary form. We will compare treatments of various kinds of natural environments and trace the philosophical and stylistic traditions within the nature writing genre. The authors to be considered include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Faulkner, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Ursula LeGuin, and Wendell Berry.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
Courses on "the Harlem Renaissance" have long been standard fare in college curricula, but this rubric is too narrow to encompass the dramatic changes in early 20th century African American culture that made possible the careers of writers like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Instead, we'll begin with a question: how did the term "urban" became a euphemism for African American culture? A hundred years ago, many informed commentators scorned the notion that African American populations might become other than what they had been for centuries--overwhelmingly rural and Southern. The massive social phenomenon that changed this status, by which millions of impoverished workers sought new lives in the industrial cities of the North, Midwest, and West Coast, is arguably the most significant event in African American history in the 20th century, and has become known as "the Great Migration." (Or, the "Great Migrations"--scholars like to pluralize everything these days--it's complicated!) "Black modernisms" should take the plural, too: as we'll see, the concept of modernism in Euro-American culture depended on a racialized theory of history and civilization that consigned people of color to the past (or, occasionally, the future), even as it was irrevocably shaped by influences of, appropriations from, and collaboration with peoples of color who saw modernity as a chance they were determined to claim for themselves. What became known as "the Harlem Renaissance" was the most famous U.S. example of such a cultural movement, but we'll explore it in a longer and more aesthetically, politically, and regionally diverse context. The artists and critics we'll examine, in addition to those mentioned above, may include Hubert Harrison, Jean Toomer, Marita Bonner, Richard Bruce Nugent, Bessie Smith, Richard Wright, David Levering Lewis, Cheryl Wall, and Brent Hayes Edwards.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course will combine individual conferences with workshop sessions at which students will discuss each other's poetry. Considerable emphasis will be placed upon the problems of revision.
Prerequisite:
English 281 and permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
A course that combines individual conferences with workshop sessions. Workshop sessions will be devoted to both published and student work. Considerable emphasis will be placed on the process of revision.
Prerequisite:
English 283 or 385, or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
A course for students with experience writing fiction and an understanding of the basics of plot, character, setting, and scene. Through close study of stories in both traditional and unusual forms, we'll examine how a story's significant elements are chosen, ordered, and arranged; how the story is shaped; how, by whom, and to what purpose it's told. Students will write new stories, employing the forms and techniques studied, and discuss them in workshop.
Prerequisite:
English 283 or 384, or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
Psychoanalytic thought offers one of the most subtle and startling accounts we have of the nature of gender and sexuality, one that suggests how inextricably sexuality is bound to language, to the limits of culture, and to the problem of identity as such. We'll be interested in these issues in their own right; we'll be equally interested in the surprising ways psychoanalytic thought opens up literary, cinematic and visual works--psychoanalysis is, in the end, a form of reading. The course will weave together theoretical texts and fictions from As You Like It to Some Like it Hot. We'll explore Antigone, "chick flicks" and "buddy" films, courtly love lyrics and novels (Balzac, Woolf, Duras) in the light of thinkers such as Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
This course investigates the modernist imagination of pleasure, both sensual and aesthetic, with a particular focus on the ways that modernism's formal strategies facilitate the representation of queer pleasures, affections, intimacies, and desires. We will read some texts that seek explicitly to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender sexualities; we will look at others that radically re-imagine the feeling and expression of pleasure. We will approach these texts through the questions: What constitutes "modern" pleasure? What makes pleasure (or a representation of it) queer? And do queer textual expressions of pleasure differ from representations of LGBT sexuality and desire? In tandem with our discussion of literary form, we will consider the crucial role that subcultural sites of intimacy, like Harlem?s cabarets and Natalie Barne's sapphic salon, played in the collaborative production and transatlantic circulation of modernism. Authors likely to be studied include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin. We will also consider visual and aural texts, including photographs of the Barney salon, cubist portraits and landscapes, and the music of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. We will read the work of sexologists and situate modernist literature in relation to early 20th--century scientific and cultural conversations about the nature of pleasure. Some contemporary scholarship on modernist sexual culture and much queer and feminist theory will accompany these texts and provide a framework for our analysis of modernism's queer pleasures.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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