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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
How might thinking of the African American increase our understanding of U.S. society's diversity and its relation to the modern world? If such a task could be addressed by looking at the work of one thinker, who would it be? This course offers writer and philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois as one avenue to answering these questions. Not only did DuBois predict that the problem of the twentieth century would be the "problem of the color line," and study for his PhD at the University of Berlin and Harvard University in the 1890s. Not only did he found the NAACP and gained the respect of thinkers and activists like Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein. W.E.B. Du Bois was also a prolific writer of philosophy, fiction, correspondence, editorials, novels, and lectures, resulting in a 70-year career and over 175,000 pages of published and unpublished writings. This course will only read (and, in some cases, view or listen to) some of the key moments in Du Bois's intellectual career, primarily Souls of Black Folk, John Brown, Dark Princess, selections from Black Reconstruction and Darkwater. We will examine how he reconfigured philosophical concepts, literary genres and tropes in specific contexts to think in innovative ways about African Americans and our modern world in general. We will also contextualize Du Bois in relation to national and international figures in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Ultimately, we will consider how his ideas can inform critical thinking about the present. Grades will consist of class participation and writing assignments based on particular themes that encountered in Du Bois's thought.
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3.00 Credits
One of the exciting aspects of American culture is that we make it up as we go along: there is no historical or traditional or divine template that we all agree to follow. Without a template, American artists and thinkers have often resorted to a "kitchen-sink" approach to representing American culture, which begs the question of how to create a form to contain all the marvelous odds and ends. We will trace this urge to capture American culture through the form of a collage in R. W. Emerson's essays, H. D. Thoreau's Walden, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Ezra Pound's Cantos, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, Langston Hughes' Montage of a Dream Deferred, Assemblage art of the fifties and sixties, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and A New Literary History of America.
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3.00 Credits
Since the Renaissance - when ancient underground rooms were discovered beneath Rome with walls covered in scandalous depictions of human-animal hybrids - the grotesque has been a controversial presence in the various arts. In this class we're going to look and listen to examples of the grotesque, from German Expressionist sleepwalkers to Goth singers with smeared mascara, from Kafka's man-who-becomes-an-insect and hunger artist to Kurt Cobain's starved body with a "mosquito" for a "libido," from Alfred Hitchcock's shattering swarms of cinematic birds to the violent fairytales of David Lynch, from Kara Walker's unsettling silhouettes from Antebellum South to Matthew Barney's body-as-spectacle, from Surrealism's "exquisite corpses" to the Rodarte fashion shows of burnt dresses, from Sylvia Plath's suicide sideshow to Lady Gaga's sensational masques. We will also consider various theoretical frameworks for the grotesque. Course work will write one short paper and one longer, research-based paper.
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3.00 Credits
Discussions of the late-nineteenth, early twentieth-century literary and cultural movement of modernism often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasize the modern movement's experiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider the role of authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), and a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance. We will examine the work of these authors not only in the context of modernism, but also as it relates to many issues of the day, including progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, in addition to the question of "Americanness" and its importance to an understanding of American literature during this time. Considering these different vantage points in American literary modernism, we will try to imagine the contours of "American modernisms," and draw some conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context. In so doing, we'll seek to arrive at a more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning of the modern in American literature and culture. Course texts: Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter; Waldo Frank, Holiday; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Ernest Hemingway, Torrents of Spring; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Jean Toomer, Cane; William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! Course Requirements: Two 10-page essays, one mini-presentation, one larger presentation
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3.00 Credits
A study of American literature of the modern period.
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3.00 Credits
For Victorians, the end of the nineteenth century was a time of instability, anxiety, as wells as possibility. This period, known as fin-de-siècle, witnessed an explosion in sexual and gender transgression, as embodied by dandies and decadents. This time period was also one where there were great political and economic conflicts in the form of growing labor and socialist movement. The fin-de-siècle also observed the birth of the New Woman who lobbied for sexual, economic, and social equality. And this period also saw the emergence of new aesthetic movement, with its radical philosophy of "art for art's sake". This course will consider a range of literary texts that are representative of the political, cultural and aesthetic innovations that define the fin-de-siècle. These texts will be organized according to the following four thematic sections: 1) Socialism and Labor Politics, 2) the Aesthetic movement, 3) Decadents and Dandies, and 4) the New Woman. We will begin with William Morris's New From Nowhere and then, by section two, move on to poetry by Michael Field and Amy Levy. Our discussions of Oscar Wilde's prose and novel The Picture of Dorian Gray will carry us into section three, where we will also consider prose by Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons. The course will conclude with Ella Hepworth Dixon's novel, The Story of a Modern Woman as wells as stories by Victoria Cross and Olive Schreiner. Scholarly criticism and selections from Victorian writings will help us to read these texts in response to one another and as situated within their respective historical and cultural contexts. Learning Goals: Students in this course will become aware of the various conventions of genres such as literary realism, utopian fiction, aesthetic poetry, the short story, and prose writing. Students will also learn to recognize how a literary text employs a range of aesthetic, formal, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies, and how these interconnect to make the text and organic whole. A range of assignments and classroom activities provide students with the opportunity to develop these technical and analytical skills. Regular participation, including classroom discussion and four short response papers (2 typed pages maximum), cultivates an environment of on-going and collaborative learning. The group presentation (2-3 students) teaches students to appreciate as well as to assess the claims of literary scholars. The short paper (8-10 pages) gives students an opportunity to draw on these rhetorical skills as they propose their own contextualized interpretation of a text. In the final paper (12 pages), students develop their own researched and critically-informed argument as positioned within an community of literary scholarship. Ideally, students will emerge from this course with an appreciation not only for fin-de-siècle literature but also for the importance of literary practices and strategies within their own daily lives. Course requirements include: regular participation, 2 papers, a presentation, a final exam. Required texts: William Morris's New From Nowhere, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (Broadview edition), The Fin de Siècle (eds, Ledger and Luckhurst). Additional readings on e-reserves
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the works of several African-American women writers, including Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan, specifically the relation these writers have to the larger American culture and what they have to say about our collective vision and future.
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3.00 Credits
A critical examination of the literature and scholarly writings about literature from "women of color" across disparate cultural backgrounds.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the narratives/stories written by Latino/a writers and what these works say about personal as well as cultural identities.
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3.00 Credits
A historical and thematic account of the rise and achievement of African-American authors over several centuries.
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