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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In his masterpiece, A Season in Hell, French visionary and boy-genius Arthur Rimbaud proclaimed: "One must be absolutely modern." This remained at the core of the varied, radical artistic explorations that form the category Modern Poetry. In the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, to be modern meant to keep up with and try to respond to vertigo-inducing, often brilliant and often shocking changes in technology and politics, including the invention of trains and planes, films and cars, and the horrific violence of two world wars. We will study how the intense and greatly varied impulse of modern poetry took shape in the U.S., from Walt Whitman through Modernism to the upheavals of the 1960s. In the process, we will discuss such still pervasive questions as what is the value of "the new"? Must the new always be shocking? Can art be political? Should it be? We will also problematize our own positions as historians of this movement. What thinkers, writers and administrators have determined our views of these poets? Is poetry still "modern"? What does modern mean today?
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will undertake a comparative survey of twentieth-century American naturalist novels, tracing a trajectory from turn-of-the-century texts by Norris, Chesnutt, and Dreiser, to the neo-naturalist fiction of a few decades later that operated alongside developments in modernist literary form (Stein, Wright), and concluding with a look at its postwar resurgence in the novels of authors such as Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. We will also discuss the return to these novels in recent films including There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Students will be asked to write one short formal analysis and two mid-length papers, in addition to regular discussion assignments.
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3.00 Credits
A study of literature that takes up the history, urban concerns, and national pretense of what for much of the twentieth century was America's second largest city.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the core elements associated with black politics in the US: the role of black institutions such as the black church, the importance of the civil rights movement in challenging barriers to black political participation, the mid-20th century legal framework created to open access to the political system, and the development of black political participation in northern cities. Competition for leadership roles and public resources from the increasing numbers of Latinos, Asians and other immigrants will also be addressed. Since the course will be taught in spring 2010 at the beginning of the second year of the Obama administration, we will also have the chance to explore the impact of the first black President on national politics, and to consider the impact of the president and his administration on African American politics itself. The course incorporates political science concepts, but the readings and other materials are accessible to students from a variety of disciplines and levels of knowledge.
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3.00 Credits
If "critique" refers to the analysis of the present towards the transformation of society then this course considers how African American literature has functioned in this creative and critical mode from its inception. Through lecture and class discussion, this course focuses on writings from African American authors pondering the possibilities and goals of reconstructing their communities and the United States at large. We will cover various periods of literary activity, including antebellum slave narratives, the post-Reconstruction era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts movement. We will cover multiple literary genres - including poetry, slave narrative, novel, and the essay, among others - used in the African American literary tradition placed in their historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. By reading the African American literary tradition in these contexts, we will pursue a number of questions, regarding issues of political agency, the role of the writer as intellectual, the relationship of literature to the folk, and literature as an avenue of recovering alternative histories. We will read material from Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, and others.
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3.00 Credits
What does it mean to be in a crisis? We live only a few years after a natural disaster ravaged the southern coast of the United States; after incidents of racial violence and judicial mishaps culminated in national protest. These issues have been swallowed up by our worry over an economic breakdown that has been called a mere downturn by some, a recession by others, and even fewer have called it a depression. But none of these descriptions help us understand what we mean by "crisis" and what potential there is to think and act in such turbulent times. The same sorts of issues troubling our present also troubled Americans living in the Great Depression. African American writers of that period wrote novels, short stories, autobiographies, historiographies, poetry and other literary pieces that were both aesthetically rich and experiments in thinking critically about these issues. This course simply asks: How can Depression-era African American literature help us understand what it means to think during a "crisis," and see the word as a concept, not just a media buzz word? Readings will include canonical authors like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Carter G Woodson, studied alongside artistic and theoretical responses to Hurricane Katrina, Jena 6, and other recent events.
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3.00 Credits
A multicultural study of the historical, cultural, and political circumstances behind what has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. The course will focus on the many different cultural voices that were a part of the movement, and examine their contributions to the cultural meaning of race at this time in literary history.
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3.00 Credits
This is an interdisciplinary history course examining the Latino experience in the United States after 1848. We will examine the major demographic, social, economic, and political trends of the past 150 years with an eye to understanding Latino/a America. Necessarily a large portion of the subject matter will focus on the history of Mexican-Americans, and Mexican immigrants in the Southwest, and Midwestern United States, but we will also explore the histories of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Latin Americans within the larger Latino/a community. Latinos are US citizens, and the course will spend significant time on the status of these groups before the law and their relations with the state, at the federal, local, and community level. To explore these issues within the various Latino communities of the U.S., we will explore the following key topics: historical roots of Latinos/as in the U.S.; the evolution of a Latino/a ethnicity and identity within the US; immigration, transmigration, and the shaping of Latino/a communities; Latino/a labor history; segregation; civil rights; nationalism and transnationalism; the Chicano civil rights movement; Latinos in film; and post-1965 changes in Latino/a life.
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3.00 Credits
In the late 1960s, black militant H. Rap Brown exclaimed, "Violence is as American as apple pie." It might be said that the purpose of this entire course will be to evaluate the truth of Brown's statement. This will be accomplished in two ways: first, by surveying of some of the major episodes and themes of violence in American history, from its colonial origins through contemporary foreign policy and domestic debates; and second, by assessing the meaning of that violence as it simultaneously reflects and shapes American society, culture, and values. This course will include significant reading and writing components, as well as a group project.
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3.00 Credits
In the mid-19th century, the American political system collapsed. Divergent visions of the American ideal plunged North and South into the bloodiest war in the Republic's history. This lecture course examines the roots of the nation's sectional division, the disintegration of mechanisms for political compromise, the structures and policies of the wartime Confederate and Union governments, the strategic conduct of the armed conflict, the societies at war, and the Union's first hesitant steps toward reconstruction and recovery.
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