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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
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.
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to introduce you to the ways in which American novelists, poets, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have attempted to represent labor and labor issues throughout the twentieth century. In traditional approaches to literary studies, labor is often subsumed within broader discussions of class or literature's general engagement with political or social questions. This course, on the other hand, will focus as much as possible on direct representations of actual laboring bodies and the labor movement and their evolution throughout the twentieth century. Our engagement with these issues will focus specifically on the relationship between labor and American identity and the ways in which representations of labor raise questions about the literary treatment of race and gender throughout the same time period. Although the primary objective of the class will be to get you to bring these issues to bear on literary interpretation, the course will also have to include a very basic introduction to American labor history. This will include a discussion of recent phenomena, such as the WGA strike, which bring the relationship between labor and culture into sharp relief, as well as the cultural repercussions of labor in its current form under globalization. The texts we will look at will include novels by Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Richard Wright; labor songs by Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger; films such as Harlan County U.S.A. and Modern Times; and poetry by Langston Hughes and Tillie Olsen.
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3.00 Credits
This course will be an exploration of the themes and styles of American poetry from post-World War Two to the present. We will explore the ways the poets respond to the cultural influences of their time, as well as the conversation they have within the poetic community. To have a better sense of how poems are made, students will be expected to read as well as attempt to write in the style of some of the poets we'll study. It is my hope that sometime during the semester, we will have live poets visit the class to be interviewed by the class regarding their work, and their take on the contemporary poetry scene. Students will be graded on their short response papers, a small portfolio of the poems they write, their prep work for the interviews (if this works out) and a long final paper.
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3.00 Credits
A carefully detailed look at the history of a particular form of American narrative. Along the way we will construct a methodology for reading stories, and a series of critical questions that can serve to open a story to our understanding and appreciation. At times we will give our attention to one or two remarkable stories by a particular writer, stories like Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" and F.Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat." At other times we will work through a collection of stories to highlight the aspects of a writer's particular vision and craft. These collections might include John Updike's "Pigeon Feathers" and Ernest Hemingway's "In Our Time" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Mosses from an Old Manse" and Richard Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America."
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will study the interconnections among six of our best fiction writers from the 20th century. Although these six authors could erroneously be divided along the lines of gender and race, as well as by periods (roughly pre- and post-World War II), the sometimes painful connections among these various authors and these texts in particular reveal the dynamic aesthetic and moral development of American fiction from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Morrison's Jazz. Texts: Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, "The Jazz Age"; Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, The Garden of Eden; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Toni Morrison, Sula, Jazz.
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3.00 Credits
What does it mean to "come of age" in America? How do we know when we have become adults? How have twentieth century American novelists depicted the struggle of leaving childhood behind and embracing new responsibilities? What are the consequences of growing up? In this course we will approach how select groups of American youth struggle to come to terms with what it means to be an adult in America; from Sylvia Plath's harrowing narrative of a gifted young woman's psychological breakdown in The Bell Jar to Ernest Hemmingway's fictionalization of post-WWI anomie in his classic The Sun Also Rises. We will explore this theme in novels by authors including Horatio Alger, Jr., Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Junot Díaz in order to better imagine how different social, racial and economic groups deal with what it means to grow up in America. Course requirements include four short response papers (2 pages each), a midterm and final exam, presentation, and final research paper (8-10 pages). Films will include "The Graduate," "Igby Goes Down," "Harold and Maude" and "Juno."
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative and ending with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, an exploration of the aesthetic, historical, and theoretical functions and values of war writing in the United States.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of selected seminal works of African-American literature.
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3.00 Credits
A close examination of the theme of "travel" in American literature from the Puritans to the present, focusing on literatures written by slaves seeking freedom, settlers in search of fertile land, Native Americans forced from ancestral homes, and other characters seeking "freedom" or a return to "home."
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3.00 Credits
Interracial relationships as depicted in the writings of black and white American writers.
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