3.00 Credits
Examples of possible topics include slave and captivity narratives, Native American fiction women's writings, the American Renaissance, literatures of the frontier, fin-de-siecle America, the Depression novel, literatures of immigration, Hemingway and Faulkner, and modern poetry. A description of the topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period. Women of the West: Despite its reputation as a place where "men can be men," the American West has been populated equally by women whose stories are full of adventure, violence, beauty, and regeneration.Through the lenses of fiction, poetry, nature writing, autobiography, and film, this course will introduce students to women outlaws, cross-dressers, gunslingers, prostitutes, pioneers, cowgirls, freedom fighters, ecologists, artists, and more. We will examine the ways that the West has functioned as a borderland or "contact zone" where women have experienced both freedom and oppression, both resistance and containment both racial & ethnic conflict and solidarity across such differences.
The Slave Narrative: Focusing on the genre of the African American slave narrative from its origins in the 18th century until the Civil War, this course will explore the themes of writing and self-representation, particularly as they are informed by the issues of race and gender. The authors we will study wrote autobiography during a time in which laws not only forbade slave literacy, but also denied slaves fully human status: we will investigate the significance of these "former slaves" literary acts of resistance given the social, legal, political, and material contexts in which they wrote. The last segment of the course will examine later invocations of the slave narrative after emancipation. Reading list will include: classic narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince,Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as Elizabeth Keckley's BEHIND THE SCENES: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, Sherley William's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's BELOVED.