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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In answering the question, "What was American modernism?" most literary critical perspectives might commonly be expected to focus on a modernity represented by the authors of the "lost generation" in the U.S., such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. While a conventional understanding of American modernism might serve to underscore the importance of the stylistic, cultural and artistic contributions of these and other canonical moderns, such a view might also give little consideration to the significance of those modern American voices not ordinarily heard in such a context. This course poses the question, "What was American modernism?" to answer it by exploring its roots in two less conspicuous early 20th-century American modernisms: the Chicago Renaissance of 1912-1925, and the Harlem Renaissance of 1920-1929. In "engendering renaissance," these two moments suggest a literary birth and rebirth of modern American identity that questions its seemingly stable boundaries and borders, reconfiguring the idea of "American" within and opening the door to the larger and more varied cultural fabric that is modern America(s). By locating the rise of American modernism in the relation between these two literary moments, this course will broaden our understanding of the idea of "American" at this time by considering how it is created within a frame determined by the interplay of race, gender, class and nation. In this way, it seeks to deepen our understanding of U.S. American culture and the idea of "American in the early 20th century, while suggesting new ways to engage the global social and cultural challenges facing the idea of "American" in the 21st. Course Requirements: two 5-7 page papers, group presentation, several short in-class writing assignments Course Texts: Required texts may include Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"; Jose Martí, "Our America"; Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark; Waldo Frank, Our America; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America"; Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South; Jean Toomer, Cane; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing
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3.00 Credits
More than thirty years after its official conclusion, the Vietnam War remains a specter that continues to haunt the sphere of American political and cultural discourse. Though it is often cited as a foundational moment in modern American history, these persistent and often conflicting references to the "lessons of Vietnam," the "legacy of Vietnam," or even "the Vietnam Syndrome," suggest that, even now, we may have to yet to fully come to terms with the American war in Indochina - that we remain fundamentally uncertain about its real cultural meaning. If Vietnam can indeed be considered a kind of national trauma, then have we as a nation ever really been able to "move on"? This course will examine how American writers have attempted to assign some kind of meaning to the American experience in Vietnam and to put that experience in conversation with a broader narrative of American history. It will call attention to the ways in which the subject of the Vietnam War compels these writers to revisit certain fundamental themes - the question of American identity, American exceptionalism, the morality of violence and war, identity and the definition of self, our relationship to nature, the Puritan "errand in the wilderness" - that have always been at issue in American literature. In addition to dealing with the work of several of the standard, or canonical, commentators on Vietnam - Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, Philip Caputo, Graham Green, John M. Del Vecchio - this course will also look at some of the more recent attempts to revisit the legacy of Vietnam undertaken by writers such as Denis Johnson and Bobbie Ann Mason within the past decade.
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with a children's tale from the 1880s, "Five Little Peppers and How They Grew," an examination of how urban life has been depicted in American literature and culture.
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3.00 Credits
Close reading of recent literature that explores the immigration between Mexico, Latin America, and the United States.
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3.00 Credits
This course will constitute a study of the strange narrative creatures populating the contemporary novel, "persons" who are something close to but not quite human. These characters and narrators are sometimes slight genetic modifications of the traditional human, cognitive beings existing after traditional comforts such as history, or victims of technological trauma who think just a little bit differently than what we are accustomed to. By examining these novels and their techniques for rendering the interiority of such characters, we will also begin a survey and discussion of how key texts in narrative theory might be accountable to the perspectives forming each tex's experiment with fictional form. By doing so, we will also consider the alienation that always goes along with reading novels in the twenty-first century. Texts will include Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and others.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of American poets and poetry after World War Two
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3.00 Credits
This course explores how poetry took a leading role among the arts in California at mid-century, creating a California culture that through the Beats and the Hippies became a national and international phenomenon. We begin by looking at collage, the dominant form of the arts in California, and then consider how collage meets up with four main elements of the California aesthetic: surrealism, mysticism, jazz, and anarchism. The primary poets we read and hear are Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and D.J. Waldie. Alongside these poets, we will look at Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, artists like Jess, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Joan Brown, and Jay DeFeo, and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. Students will gain the ability to do interdisciplinary work in the arts, to read complex contemporary poetry, and to relate art movements to the culture that surrounds them. Requirements include essays and a final exam.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of American women writers from Chopin to present.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore 20th-century African American autobiography in order to consider how personal narratives of freedom, struggle and development engage with dominant narratives of success and individualism. What is the relationship between individual and collective memories? If narrative is the way we come to understand the world we live in, how do Ida Wells, Richard Wright, Claude Brown, Malcolm X, Charlayne Hunter Gault, Maya Angelou and others represent African American experience and complicate the site of memory? This course will entail archival research.
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3.00 Credits
This course will be an exploration of African American poetry as seen through the lens of the first books of some of the best known and read writers in the African American canon. Some of the poets we may be reading include Phyllis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and Natasha Trethewey, among others. Students should expect to read at least 7 books, write a short report on each poet we read and the era they represent, and a long final paper on some aspect of African American poetry touched upon in our reading.
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