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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
We will read, discuss, and study selected novels of significant importance within the American literary tradition. As we explore these novels within their historical and cultural context, we will consider the various reasons for their place within the canon of American literature. Indeed, we will scrutinize the very nature of this literary canon and self-consciously reflect on the inevitably arbitrary nature of this, or any, reading list. Even so, we will see, I hope, that these authors share deep engagement with ideas and themes common to American literature and do so, through their art, in ways that both teach and delight. Required texts: Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Old Man and the Sea, The Bluest Eye.
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3.00 Credits
A study of literature that takes up the history, urban concerns, and national pretense of what for much of the twentieth century was America's second largest city.
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3.00 Credits
If "critique" refers to the analysis of the present towards the transformation of society then this course considers how African American literature has functioned in this creative and critical mode from its inception. Through lecture and class discussion, this course focuses on writings from African American authors pondering the possibilities and goals of reconstructing their communities and the United States at large. We will cover various periods of literary activity, including antebellum slave narratives, the post-Reconstruction era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts movement. We will cover multiple literary genres - including poetry, slave narrative, novel, and the essay, among others - used in the African American literary tradition placed in their historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. By reading the African American literary tradition in these contexts, we will pursue a number of questions, regarding issues of political agency, the role of the writer as intellectual, the relationship of literature to the folk, and literature as an avenue of recovering alternative histories. We will read material from Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, and others.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the interconnectedness among literatures of prominent authors from the Americas, Africa, England, and the Caribbean.
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3.00 Credits
What does it mean to be male or female in America? How different are our ideas about gender from those of other cultures? This course will focus on the 20th century and look at the origins and development of masculine and feminine roles in the United States. How much have they changed over time and what aspects have been retained? We will explore the ways that cultural images, political changes, and economic needs have shaped the definition of acceptable behavior and life choices based on gender. Topics will range from Victorian ideals through the Jazz Age and war literature to movie Westerns, '50s television families, and '60s youth culture; and into recent shifts with women's rights, extreme sports, and talk shows.
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3.00 Credits
An intensive study of the philosophy and spirituality of three of the greatest peace educators of our century: M. Gandhi, A. Heschel and M. Luther King.
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3.00 Credits
They go by many names: bohos, artists, radicals, intellectuals, TRAs, mixies, and punks. They are members of the African Diaspora who defy the stereotypical construction of Black people that the media and a history of marginalization by the "mainstream" culture have created. People who look like them and with whom they share the same politicized racial identity often ostracize them. Are these individuals dangerous outsiders, who by eschewing the communal traditions that led to the securing of civil rights for a united African American population are imperiling Black identity with a quest for individual freedom? Or, are they renegades whose explorations outside of accepted constructions of Black identity challenge entrenched ideas of race, class, sexuality and gender, not only for African Americans, but for everyone living in a postmodern multicultural world? Are they part of a long and illustrious history of identity exploration by African Americans who helped to shape and change American culture? These are some of the questions we will explore in this course. It is an investigation into the lives, work, and legacies of members of the African Diaspora who are clearly into "some other mess" that is, those who insist on doing their own thing in world that still takes issue with individual freedom of expression for some marginalized peoples. The assertion of the right to individual expression raises questions that are at the heart of the American ideal of integration and the African American construct of community. By critically engaging the works of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, writings by generations of cultural critics, the stories of adoptees and multiracial African Americans, the music of progressive musicians, scholarship by Black feminists of both genders, and the media representations of African Americans in the Postwar United States, we will begin to understand the role of people of African descent in America as outsiders, both communally and individually.
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3.00 Credits
This course is an introductory survey of the Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa from their origins to the present day. It will deal with the history and expansion of Islam, both as a world religion and civilization, from its birth in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century to its subsequent spread to other parts of western Asia and North Africa. Issues of religious and social ethics, political governance, gender, social relations, and cultural practices will be explored in relation to a number of Muslim societies in the region, such as in Egypt, Morocco, and Iran. The course foregrounds the diversity and complexities present in a critical area of what we call the Islamic world today.
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3.00 Credits
While many Christians have described Islam as a Christian heresy, many Muslims consider Christianity to be an Islamic heresy. Jesus, they maintain, was a Muslim prophet. Like Adam and Abraham before him, like Muhammad after him, he was sent to preach Islam. In this view Islam is the natural religion -- eternal, universal and unchanging. Other religions, including Christianity, arose only when people went astray. Therefore Muslims have long challenged the legitimacy of Christian doctrines that differ from Islam, including the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Cross, the New Covenant and the Church. In this course we will examine Islamic writings, from the Qur'an to contemporary texts, in which these doctrines are challenged. We will then examine the history of Christian responses to these challenges and consider, as theologians, how Christians might approach them today.
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3.00 Credits
US Latino spirituality is one of the youngest spiritualities among the great spiritual traditions of humanity. The course will explore the indigenous, African, and European origins of US Latino spirituality through the devotions, practices, feasts, and rituals of the people.
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