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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Representations of "black sheep" in selected 20th century American novels.
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3.00 Credits
The literature of Latina/o immigration and migrancy brings together a range of contemporary concerns, from identity, to the transnational, to definitions of the literary. How does international movement inflect notions of American identity? How do writers create and describe communities in constant movement? These are only two questions that can be posed to the literatures of Latina and Latino transnational and intra-national movement. In this course, we will read a range of recent materials dealing with immigration between Mexico and Latin America and the United States, and with intra-national migrancy. Key texts will include, Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway, Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, Tomas Rivera's and the Earth did not devour him, and Elva Treviño Hart's Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child. In addition, we will draw upon various critical readings focusing on transnationalism, displacement, and new theories about contemporary globalization. Students will write three short essays and a final exam, and will be required to participate actively in class.
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3.00 Credits
"We had the experience, but missed the meaning." So wrote T. S. Eliot, reflecting on a 30-year period that saw virtually the entire Western world experience a simultaneous and monumental spiritual, emotional, and intellectual crisis. Eliot's is just one of a tremendous variety of literary responses to a radically changing world that makes up the period called "modernism," in which both the world and how it was written about changed dramatically. This involves engagement with questions that are central to everyone's life - from the nature of God, love, friendship, race, sex, gender, and war, to drinking, laughing, shopping, cows, crabs, and puppy dogs (seriously). We'll be reading a variety of texts - both British and American, poetry and fiction, bridging the period between the two Great Wars (Yeats, Pound, Williams, Loy, Eliot; Ford, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Forster, Woolf, Rhys) - that, for various reasons and in myriad ways, experiment with preexisting conventional notions of genre, narrative, point of view, and language. By engaging these texts alongside short readings by the authors about their own writing, the goal of the course is to gain confidence working through texts that might otherwise be too intimidating to read in other contexts by tending to basic questions first: what did these writers and poets say themselves that they were doing, and why did they do it? Such basic questions will provide the necessary background against which the innovation and astonishing beauty of these works can take shape. As importantly, you will be introduced to an interpretive framework through which to understand literature and to think about why it matters in terms of larger social, cultural, and even personal contexts. No prior knowledge is assumed. We will cover in class methodological instruction devoted to the skills such as poetic scansion, close reading, note taking, etc. that are necessary to read, interpret, and discuss literary texts in terms of their formal elements as well as their connections to larger social, cultural, and literary contexts. The broader goal is to develop new ways of thinking about human experience and especially language that will remain long after the surface data of names, dates, and terms has faded, and to gain the confidence and skills necessary to make you feel like you can read, and think through, anything.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers a survey of black diasporic artistry. At the same time, it answers the question, "who constitutes the Black Diaspora?" in unique ways. We will focus primarily on this conversation's development from the 1920s up to the present through poetry, prose fiction and nonfiction, visual art, film, and television. Attention will be devoted to how these different genres and media frame what is known (or unknown) about the Black Diaspora. Moreover, we will consider how these media and genres influence political activism in the Black Diaspora. Due to the diversity of the materials covered, the themes will give the course its unity. Students will be urged to follow a particular theme (or two) throughout the course. Some of these themes might include race, gender, class, the body, and leadership. Some of the artists and intellectuals in this survey will include: African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Nathaniel Mackey; Trinidadian-Canadian poet M. Nourbese Philip; musicians like Nigerian artist and activist Fela Kuti; Martinican philosopher and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon; orator and activist Martin Luther King, Jr; the Haitian-Puerto Rican visual artists Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the visual artist Kehinde Wiley. Class participation is paramount. Students will also write reader response papers and research essays.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of Native American "perspective" in selected works of American literature, written by Caucasians and non-Caucasians, dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries
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3.00 Credits
How do poetry and the concept of American democracy blend? Using Emerson and Whitman as a starting point, this course will attempt to connect the dots. Poets we will be reading will include Emerson, Whitman, Neruda, June Jordan, Ginsberg, and others. We will land somewhere at the start of the present era, with the poets who have their beginnings with the slam: Paul Beatty, Patricia Smith, among others. Students will be responsible for writing reports of the books read and the era they represent (some of this may be in the form of a team video report), and for a long paper tracing either the influences that shaped one of the poets studied or on one aspect presented by our readings.
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3.00 Credits
This class will focus on key works of modern and contemporary American drama from three plays by Eugene O'Neill (Desire Under the Elms, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night) to Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize winning 2003 play Anna in the Tropics. In addition to critical readings and selected European plays on reserve, focal playwrights include Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd, Paula Vogel, Amiri Baraka, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, August Wilson, Josefina López , Yellow Robe, Anna Devere Smith, Eve Ensler, and Moisis Kaufmann. Requirements will include group-staged scenes, journal entries on selected plays, and three 4-page papers. In addition, students are required to attend one campus play over the course of the semester and write a written critique of the production and performance.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore the development of Asian American literature from the 1800s to the present, focusing on writers of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Hmong, Japanese and Korean descent. Discussions will focus on questions of race/ethnicity, identity/representation, nation and exile. Primary texts, including novels, short fiction, poetry, theory and film will be supplemented by critical articles. Some works to be discussed will include Carlos Bulosan's America Is In the Heart, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Faye Ng's Bone, and John Okada's No-No Boy, in addition to other texts.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration, based on the theme of memory, of several ethnic American novels, specifically the ways in which remembering one's own or one's ancestors' past becomes part of one's self-identification as an ethnic American.
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to familiarize students with the diverse concerns of black women's writing from the first novel written in 1854 through the present.
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