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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the connections between literary representations of the city and social identity in a variety of American literary texts from the 1890s to the present.
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3.00 Credits
A study of Twain's life and writings in light of the history of ideas and the literary, political, philosophical, and religious currents of 19th-century American culture. We will also consider such figures as Harte, Stowe, Douglass, and Lincoln, who illuminate Twain's style and social and moral preoccupations as well as compelling questions centering on the nature of an American identity. Special concerns: Twain's place in the tensions between conventional literary forms and the emerging American vernacular; his vision and critique of American democracy, slavery, "exceptionalism," and later geopolitical expansionism; his medievalism, including Joan of Arc, and larger interpretations of history; his treatment of women, individualism, and the family; and the later Gnosticism of #44, The Mysterious Stranger. We will also address the current (and perennial) discussions of unity and pluralism in American culture, as in Garry Wills's delineation of an underlying American identity in Under God and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 's fear of "balkanization" in The Disuniting of America. Readings: selected shorter works, including Diary of Adam and Eve; Innocents Abroad; Life on the Mississippi; Tom Sawyer; Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee; Pudd'nhead Wilson; #44, The Mysterious Stranger; and selections from the Autobiography.
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3.00 Credits
Vann Woodward, the late eminent historian of the U.S. South, once noted that the study of the U.S. South stood "in great need of comparative dimensions if suitable comparative partners could be found," comparative projects, he added, beyond the now stale North-South axis. Woodward was speaking specifically of comparative history, but other disciplines such as English, can also generate such comparative projects. This course will examine a significant range of two distinctive yet comparable bodies of American literature, mostly twentieth century, produced respectively in the U.S. South and in the culture area that Americo Paredes called "Greater Mexico." Americo Paredes, a U.S. intellectual and literary figure akin to Woodward, coined the phrase, Greater Mexico, to refer to all peoples of Mexican-origin wherever they may be geographically found although they continue to be concentrated in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Our close examination of such literary works, all written in English, will proceed from a broad understanding of these two cultural-geographical areas as historically created peripheral zones relative to a dominant capitalist core even as we will also take account of direct connections between these two peoples. Authors: Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh, Caballero: A Historical Novel ; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children; Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez: A Mexico-Texan Novel; Walker Percy, The Movie-Goer; Rolando Hinojosa, The Valley and Rites and Witnesses; Mary Karr, The Liars' Club; John Phillip Santos, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation; Bobbie Anne Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories; Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of 19th Century American literature, emphasing the efforts of American writers to identify and define "democracy" and the "democratic citizen."
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3.00 Credits
This course approaches the poetry and painting of Manhattan during its rise to international pre-eminence as an artistic center through the work and friendships of Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art. It introduces the New York School of poetry, referring to visual art from de Kooning to Warhol and with side-glances at film, photography, music and dance. The course will develop primarily through reading poems, although students will be directed to the critical and historical context. Readings will draw on The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (ed. Donald Allen); John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out; Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets; and a course pack. Course requirements are written analyses of poems (every two weeks), a final exam, and a 5-7 page paper.
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of selected classic American novels.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of short stories and novels depicting the "working stiff" in the U.S. from 1920 to the present. Our reading list will include many of the usual suspects (James Farrell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Nora Zeale Hurston, William Saroyan, Langston Hughes, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Raymond Carver); writers not usually associated with labor (Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, and Donald Barthelme); and contemporary writers (Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Edwidge Danticat, Juno Díaz, Gish Jen, and George Saunders). We'll question the representation of labor, laborers, and class differences, and we'll also pose aesthetic questions: What narrative forms most provocatively explore particular kinds of work? What work do experimental texts perform that more conventional narratives cannot (and vice versa)? Many of thetheorists we'll rely on for insights about workers, class, and writing (Tillie Olsen, James Agee, and Barbara Ehrenreich) make good use of narrative themselves, and will help us contemplate how writing about labor can also reflect the labor of writing. Short response papers, group presentation, midterm, and a final project.
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative and ending with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, an exploration of the aesthetic, historical, and theoretical functions and values of war writing in the United States.
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3.00 Credits
Using concepts of tragedy as a linking principle, this course reads several Shakespearean plays and then Moby-Dick, noting Shakespeare's influence on the American novelist.
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of various 20th-century African-American literatures, with foci on how black subjectivity is created; the relationship between literature, history, and cultural mythology; the dialectic of freedom and slavery in American rhetoric; the American obsession with race; and the sexual ideology and competing representations of domesticity.
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