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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Early twentieth-century Chicago was famous for its railways and stockyards, jazz and gangsters. The city saw the creation of great industrial fortunes and the birth in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World. The literature taken up in this class brings the dynamic contradictions of the Chicago experience to life. We will look at work by Jane Addams, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Ward, and Richard Wright, covering a range of literary expression from impassioned journalism, to poetry, novels, and drama. We will consider the relation of modernism to realism. We will look at the ways in which Chicago capitalism altered nature, challenged traditional forms of identity, and created new forms of urban community. We will spend a week exploring Chicago's jazz and blues, while we will also look at the 1932 gangster film Scarface, screenplay by Chicago journalist and Oscar winner Ben Hecht. Chicago is a city of tremendous vitality and shocking brutality that has reinvented itself time and again, and the writers we will read have taken up this task of urban invention with a shared urgency and a wide range of voices. Course requirements: active class participation, short response papers, creative responses (poems), a class presentation of a scene from Big White Fog by Theodore Ward, and an 8 - 10 page paper.
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3.00 Credits
We will read, discuss, and study selected novels of significant importance within the American literary tradition. As we explore these novels within their historical and cultural context, we will consider the various reasons for their place within the canon of American literature. Indeed, we will scrutinize the very nature of this literary canon and self-consciously reflect on the inevitably arbitrary nature of this, or any reading list. Even so, we will see, I hope, that these authors share deep engagement with ideas and themes common to American literature and do so, through their art, in ways that both teach and delight. Required texts: Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Old Man and the Sea, The Bluest Eye.
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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
Discussions of the late nineteenth and 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
This interdisciplinary course focuses on cultural studies as a critique of larger systems of domination, and will introduce you to major voices of African American critical theory. Paul Gilroy suggests that "popular culture always has its base in the experiences, the pleasures, the memories, the traditions of the people." Black Cultural Studies is interested in the wider sphere of critical practice, national politics and how popular culture can both resist and perpetuate the idea of America. While visual and literary studies have been seen as historically separate disciplines, we will use theories from each to study those forms of self-representation that defy disciplinary boundaries. With an eye on the way black popular culture is mythologized through commodification and rife with contradictions, we will examine the conflicted ways in which racial identities and differences have been constructed throughout American culture. We will consider how new debates about the history of race have changed American literary, historical and cultural studies. We will put theoretical tracks in conversation with literature, music, visual art, the body, film and food, and use these cultural texts as a method of engaging sustained social and political critique.
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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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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to introduce you to the ways in which American novelists, poets, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have attempted to represent labor and labor issues throughout the twentieth century. In traditional approaches to literary studies, labor is often subsumed within broader discussions of class or literature's general engagement with political or social questions. This course, however, will focus as much as possible on direct representations of actual laboring bodies and the labor movement, and their evolution throughout the twentieth century. Our engagement with these issues will focus specifically on the relationship between labor and American identity and the ways in which representations of labor raise questions about the literary treatment of race and gender throughout the same time period. Although the primary objective of the class will be to get you to bring these issues to bear on literary interpretation, the course will also include a very basic introduction to American labor history. This will include a discussion of recent phenomena, such as the WGA strike, which bring the relationship between labor and culture into sharp relief, as well as the cultural repercussions of labor in its current form under globalization. The texts we will look at will include novels by Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Richard Wright; labor songs by Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger; films such as Harlan County U.S.A. and Modern Times; and poetry by Langston Hughes and Tillie Olsen.
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3.00 Credits
We will read, discuss, and write about a wide range of contemporary writing by women, with a particular concentration on the short story and the writers visiting Notre Dame's Women Writers Festival. Our readings will include realistic fiction as well as innovative and experimental work, including graphic fiction; some of our readings will focus on women's experiences and perspectives, but some will "make the leap" to imagine men's consciousness and reality. We'll also read critical essays and reflections by the writers themselves to situate the work within the history of women writers; we'll be especially interested in the publishing and critical realities facing women writers today. Reading journal, midterm and final, brief presentation, and 8 - 10 page critical paper.
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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 aesthetic 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. A very tentative reading list: Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man, Richard Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America, Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five, Saul Bellow - Herzog, John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse, John Updike - Rabbit Run, Anne Tyler - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Walker Percy - The Second Coming. There will be a mid-term and final as well as an independent paper on a novel selected by each student.
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3.00 Credits
National borders mark our Americas today, but for the first European explorers the landscapes of their "new world" were uncharted and unbounded. The newly encountered land invited utopian dreams even as it became the arena for genocidal violence. To reconsider these moments of violence and possibility, we will approach early American literature intra-hemispherically, reading not just from the British colonial record, but also Spanish documents in English translation. We will read comparatively in order to ask key questions about American identity both then and now. For example, what do we learn when we juxtapose Cortés' invasion of the Mexican empire to King Philip's war in the New England colonies? To what degree do these legacies of imperialism still shape our modern world? What comparisons arise between the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz; between the captivity adventures of Cabeza de Vaca and Mary Rowlandson? How might these contact points continue to shape our views of "others"? How have Native Nations across the Americas written or spoken the loss of worlds? The authors and subjects noted above will serve as key markers, but we will also read primary works by William Bradford, Bernal Díaz, John Smith, William Apess, and others as we reconsider the literatures and histories of the Americas in a cross-national paradigm. Students will be expected to write three short papers, take a final exam, and participate actively in class.
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