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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
What was the Harlem Renaissance? While traditional notions of this time in literary history have conceived of it as a brief but luminous flowering of the arts in African-American culture, not so much attention has been given to the many different voices that contributed to the movement, and which shaped its representations of race in the early twentieth century. In this course, we will examine the meaning and significance of the Harlem Renaissance as conventionally understood, then move on to an exploration of Harlem's Americas, or the many cultural locations from which race and racial representation were being considered both inside and outside the movement's accepted parameters. Thus, rather than studying the Harlem Renaissance solely as an African-American phenomenon, we'll also explore the interrelationships between a number of its core works, along with several others from the same period not generally studied in this context. In seeking to understand the writing of Harlem's Americas, we'll investigate how all of the texts we examine are engaged in a larger dialogue on the meaning of race in the early twentieth century, both in the United States and beyond. In so doing, we'll try to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of the Harlem Renaissance, while considering what this may have to tell us about race and racial representation, not only in the early twentieth century, but on into the twenty-first. Course texts: Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery; W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing; Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter; Jean Toomer, Cane; Carl van Vechten, Nigger Heaven; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South Course requirements: Three five-page essays, in-class writing, 20-minute group presentation
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3.00 Credits
An examination of poetry and poetics by black Americans from the beginnings to the present.
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3.00 Credits
Many contemporary writers began long and productive careers during the decades after the second world war. In this course we will study some of them, using representative texts to try to work out an aesthetics of the time. We will need to look at questions of personal identity, as they embrace spiritual, sexual, social, and racial dimensions. And we will also give close attention to the elasticity of the novel form itself.
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3.00 Credits
This course traces the social changes that accompanied America's movement from early retailing to a full-blown consumer culture. Beginning with representations from the later part of the 19th century, particularly of the development of Chicago as a mail order capital of the world and moving into the present through an examination of television shopping networks, this course will use material from a variety of perspectives and diciplines to examine what became a wholesale transformation of American life. In attempting to trace the trajectory of change from a country often identified by its rural isolation to a country of relentless publicity, from the farm to Paris Hilton, (who returned to The Simple Life), we will look at a series of linkages each of which played a specific and contributory role in the cultural shift toward a fully saturated consumerism. For instance, the early mail order catalogue empires of Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Warren Sears depended on the capacity of the railroad and postal service to transport their goods from shopping catalogues to country kitchens, goods that went beyond kitchen utensils, clothes, ornaments, and shoes to include assembly-ready homes. South Bend has several Sears and Roebuck homes and part of our class time will be spent in looking at these houses in the context of the course themes. All of our discussion will take place against the backdrop of a larger question about the democratization of desire, about whether American culture became more or less democratic after the introduction of the mail order catalogue. Thus, the linkage between the cataloque, the home shopping network, and the notion that freedom to desire goods is a measure of democratic freedom. Of course, the possibilites for manipulation and control are also limitless.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of faith, religion, the sacred, and the divine in selected Latino/a writings.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines how various forms of popular culture from Latin America and the Caribbean migrate to the U.S. and are reappropriated by Latina/o cultural producers. Focusing particularly on theories of melodrama as a feminine discursive space, we will analyze several works of Latina/o literature that underscore women's active interpretation of music, film, and television. While this is a literature-based course, students will also examine how hybrid cultural products such as contemporary boleros, films, and telenovelas produce a transnational imaginary that connects Latinas/os in the U.S. with Latin America and the Caribbean. We will read novels such as Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, and Tomorrow They Will Kiss by Eduardo Santiago.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of selected novels written during the 1990s.
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3.00 Credits
Readings in twentieth century southern fiction from 1900 - 1960, including Kate Chopin, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. We will examine both the recurring subjects of the Jim Crow era -- "sin, sex, and segregation," in the old Southern phrase -- and the stylistic innovations of the writers. We'll pay special attention to contemporary criticism that explores the period from historical, political, and cultural perspectives.
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3.00 Credits
Throughout American history, those who took a hand to alter nature - or raised one to preserve it - have rarely been concerned exclusively with the continent's ecosystems. Rather, they saw themselves as advancing lofty ideals, such as progress or freedom. After a general introduction to American environmental history, this course examines how nineteenth and twentieth century American explorers, activists and writers have understood our alterations to landscape and river, and what the stakes are for modern environmentalists who seek to preserve what wilderness remains.
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3.00 Credits
Although the range and productivity of American women writers over the last two centuries has been enormous, the proliferation of extremely accomplished and important women writers has virtually mushroomed in the last few decades, embracing leading poets (such as Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich), leading novelists (such as Alice Walker, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison) and altogether new voices such as the Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, the Asian-American novelist Amy Tan, and the Native-American Susan Power (to name only a few). To narrow the range of this explosive development in American literature, we will primarily focus on the work of women written in this country after WW II, with special interest on the last two decades. In addition to a small sampling of a number of different writers to be found in our class reader, we will ultimately focus on seven writers: Elizabeth Bishop (poetry), Adrienne Rich (poetry and essays), June Jordan (poetry and essays), Amy Tan (fiction), Lorna Dee Cervantes (poetry), Susan Power (fiction), and Sandra Gilbert (poetry and essays).
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