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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will be focusing on the significance poetic communities have had on poetry in the 20th century. From the Modernists until today, poetic communities have been the primary center of writing, publication, collaboration, and theorizing. We will start from the premise that poets do notwork alone, but cultivate a community of poets and artists with whom they write. When we look at poetry through the lens of community, rather than through individual poets, we are able to understand the art worlds they inhabited and the ways in which collaboration with painters, filmmakers, and musicians helped to create a poetry that addressed the needs and ambitions of a particular group. Poetic communities are politically engaged groups that often function as sites of resistance, critique, and exploration. With each poetic community we study from Modernism, to Black Mountain, to The New York School, to Minimalism, to the Beat Generation, to Punk rock, we will be asking what particular historical circumstances enabled the formation of the community, what challenge does each community address, how does one community's concerns differ politically or historically from another community, and how do these group affiliations condition their poetry. By focusing on poetry that is created within and between poetic communities we will examine how their writing is able to engage the construction of self and other, how modern poetry challenges artistic and academic institutions, and how modern poetry interacts with various media, such as painting, music, and film.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of a wide variety of literature (fiction, poetry, testimonio, personal essay, autobiography, critical essay, and oral history) and film written by and about women in the Americas from the time of conquest/encounter to the present.
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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
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
This course will introduce students to major works of Asian American literature while exploring issues of sexuality and gender in this body of literature. We will focus on race/ethnicity, authenticity, and representation as contested sites in Asian American literature and how these contested sites produce inter/intraracial tensions about the Asian body as it is viewed from within Asian American literature and from without. Primary texts will include novels, short fiction, poetry, film, drama, the graphic novel and critical essays.
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3.00 Credits
A comparative study of the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker, with particular emphasis on gender, class, and historical issues explored in each author's works.
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3.00 Credits
A sampling of novels written by Caribbean writers, with a particular emphasis on such themes as colonization, madness, childhood, and memory.
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3.00 Credits
Representations of "black sheep" in selected 20th century American novels.
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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
Fictional representations of "strangers" and "outsiders" in American literature from the 18th to 21st centuries.
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