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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the overlapping, intersecting, and intertwined experiences of distinct enthoracial communities in the United States. Students will investigate these experiences from a relational and connective point of view to tease out the contested meanings of nation, citizenship, community, rights, and struggle. For example, we will examine the 1947 school desegregation case involving Mexican Americans in California, Mendez v. Westminster, and its relationship to African American civil rights, Puerto Rican migration, and Japanese internment. Mendez v. Westminster, when approached from a connective perspective, reveals a multiracial and diasporic landscape that is more complex than previously considered. A connective approach to Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora allows us to uncover important episodes of collaboration and tension that have been rendered invisible when studied independently. Working with ethnography, history, literature, critical essays, visual culture, and popular culture, this course focuses on the complicated bonds among multiracial constituencies and potential future forms of collaboration.
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3.00 Credits
The 1840s and 50s are known as "the American Renaissance," a watershed in American literary history which includes Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby-Dick, Emerson's essays and Hawthorne's fiction. It also includes major abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will read through this essential period of American literature by asking how key authors figure intimacy, emotion, and experience. That inquiry, in turn, will help us explore the formations of literary work and its interventions into the culture of a nation heading toward Civil War and conscious of its fractures. How did these authors imagine the gulf between self and not-self, and the potential to bridge that gulf? Did the written word have the power to make readers "feel right," as Stowe hoped, or to correct them when they felt wrong, as Douglass attempts to do when he tells his audience that slave songs express sorrow, not joy? As we move through a rich variety of texts, we will explore how authors try to move their readers, and how they conceive of emotion's relationship to the individual person and to the culture at large.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the AP Exam in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
In this class we will investigate the primary approaches to the study of popular expression and identity, with particular emphasis on Latina/o popular music as it relates to questions of gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and the nation. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How is Latina/o identity expressed through the "popular" or the everyday? In which ways does the study of Latina/o popular music and culture in general illuminate our understanding of the diverse Latina/o communities? How are we to interpret marketing phenomenon such as the Latin music "boom"? Employing a broad range of current Cultural Studies theories, methods, and core concepts, students will conduct an original semester-long research project and complete various ethnographic exercises in our analysis of the historical, socio-political, and artistic uses of popular music and culture among Latinas/os.
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3.00 Credits
"Take heed what you read!" Sojourner Truth warned her audiences. Frederick Douglass described the mixed blessing of literacy--facilitating his freedom, but not without first increasing his sense of oppression. Truth and Douglass signal the strong American awareness of both the promises and the dangers of reading, and of the intensely social nature of that seemingly insular world of the reader and the book. While, culturally speaking, we are what we read, it's not always clear how the process of digestion works. How have certain American writers become the writers they are through the books they devour or are denied? How might we account for the mutual relations between reading, consciousness and action, making sense of how reading is at once a function of our social construction, as well as a mode of transforming ourselves and the worlds we inhabit? What happens when we shift our attention from the uses of books to the uses of popular culture, and from readers to fans? Who really authors a text? Using models drawn from literary and cultural theory, social history and theories of literacy, we evaluate the ways Americans have found and lost themselves in their reading. Readings include works by Emerson, Douglass, Melville, Hawthorne, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Roland Barthes, Georges Poulet, Paolo Freire, Carlo Ginzburg, Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, Janice Radway, Constance Penley, as well as Harlequin romance, slash and mashup fiction.
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 for English majors; AMST 201 for American Studies majors
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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
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
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
American Studies independent study
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3.00 Credits
American Studies independent study
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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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