Jennifer M. Wilks

E 349D  l  Danticat and Díaz

[previously unnumbered E349S topic]

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #: 34970

Semester:  Fall 2020

Cross-lists:  AFR 330W, C L 323.60

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  In this course we will study the work of two of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the United States: Haitian American Edwidge Danticat and Dominican American Junot Díaz.  Between them Danticat (b. 1969) and Díaz (b. 1968) have won almost all of the major American cultural and literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize; and their work has been consistently published and reviewed in such high profile venues as the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times.  At the same time that their respective works speak to broader questions of American identity, however, Danticat and Díaz also write culturally specific narratives that explore the intricacies of what it means to be Haitian and Dominican, Haitian American and Dominican American, in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.  As a result, in addition to considering the qualities that have resulted in Danticat and Díaz’s elevation to the status of exemplary American authors, we will also examine how issues of gender, migration, history, and race factor into their work.

Texts (subject to change):  

General: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History; Michelle Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.

Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1995); Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Claire of the Sea Light (2013).

Junot Díaz: Drown (1996); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); This Is How You Lose Her (2012).

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (3-4 pages each), 40%; Final paper (5-7 pages), 35%; Rough draft & substantial revision (4 pages), 10%; Reading journal, 15%.

Haiti, History, and the American Imagination

Haiti is at once one of the most dismissed and most documented countries in the Western Hemisphere. According to conventional narratives of success and failure, Haiti is largely seen as a failed state, an underdeveloped nation that has not lived up to the promises of its 1804 Revolution. Despite such impressions, however, the culture and history of Haiti have captured the American—used here in a hemispheric sense—imagination to a degree rivaled by no other country (with, perhaps, the exception of the United States). Beginning with key theoretical texts and continuing on through coverage of the January 2010 earthquake, this course will interrogate Caribbean, Latin American, and U.S. responses to and representations of Haiti. What were the repercussions of the 1804 Haitian Revolution in other slaveholding societies in the Americas? How was European Enlightenment philosophy in keeping with and antithetical to said revolution? What do literary and cinematic representations of Haiti tell readers and viewers about the home country of the author/filmmaker?  Has Haiti, even amidst the rich particularity of its culture and repeated contestation of its nationhood, been construed as a representative American site? These questions and others will be explored through selected readings from literature, literary theory, and political theory and viewings from documentary film and journalism.
 
Reading List (subject to change)
Émeric Bergeaud, Stella (1859/2015)
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)
Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949)
Aimé Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963
Edwidge Danticat, “Create Dangerously” (2010)
Junot Díaz, “Monstro” (2012)
Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti” (1893)
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004)
Edouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint: théâtre (Monsieur Toussaint: A Play, 1961
Kaiama Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010)
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938)
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)
Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)
Arturo A. Schomburg, “Is Hayti Decadent?” (1904)
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997)
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, colère, folie (Love, Anger, Madness; 1968/2009)

Description: 
In After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger considers the idea of “apocalypse” in three ways: as imagined ending, as actual ending, and as revelation. This seminar will explore literary and cinematic depictions of how disasters—economic, biological, and environmental, among others—destroy and reconfigure the culture, economy, and government of the places in which they occur. For example, in some works life “after the end” finds power dispersed more equitably if not eliminated altogether whereas in others authority is decentralized only to be reconsolidated in another form or manner. New York City alone has inspired countless contemporary representations of apocalyptic events and their aftermath; however, other cities and countries will be considered as well. For example, how have writers represented the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina or early-21st-century Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake? More generally, possible areas of inquiry might include:

How apocalyptic narratives offer fresh—or familiar—paradigms through which to consider modernity

The degree to which models of New World and Old, Global South and North, self and other are revolutionized and/or replicated in representations of apocalypse

How creative explorations of the end (or ends) of the world facilitate negotiations of the economic, cultural, and demographic shifts bringing, or promising, radical change in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century societies

Required Texts/Readings:

James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999)

Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

Junot Díaz, “Monstro” (2012)

Mat Johnson, Pym (2010)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

Anne Washburn, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012)

Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)

Films:

George Romero, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (2006)

Bong Joon Ho, Snowpiercer (2013)

Assignments: 
Two short papers (4 pages each)30%

Research paper proposal (3-4 pages)15%

Final research paper (8-10 pages)35%

Oral presentation20%

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35710

Semester:  Spring 2019

Cross-lists:  AFR 372E.5

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: In his 2011 text What Was African American Literature?, University of Chicago professor Kenneth Warren provocatively speaks of African American literature in the past tense. In meditations on literary and social history, he asks whether it is possible to identify a unified body of literature by Americans of African descent in the wake of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement it engendered.  Indeed, similar questions have been raised about the larger category of race given the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.  Are we ready, however, to speak of the U.S. as a post-racial society?  If not, what does it mean to be “post-black”?  Using fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published since the year 2000, this course will address these questions and examine the thorny complications and rich complexities of black identities in the early 21st century.  These issues, in turn, will be used to develop the critical thinking and writing skills central to class discussion and assignments.

Texts: Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self; Percival Everett, Erasure; Tayari Jones,An American Marriage; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Colson Whitehead, Underground Railroad.

Requirements & Grading: Peer review/Preliminary draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%; Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (6-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses 15%.

Description:
In After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger considers the idea of “apocalypse” in three ways: as imagined ending, as actual ending, and as revelation. This seminar will explore literary and cinematic depictions of how disasters—economic, biological, and environmental, among others—destroy and reconfigure the culture, economy, and government of the places in which they occur. For example, in some works life “after the end” finds power dispersed more equitably if not eliminated altogether whereas in others authority is decentralized only to be reconsolidated in another form or manner. New York City alone has inspired countless contemporary representations of apocalyptic events and their aftermath; however, other cities and countries will be considered as well. For example, how have writers represented the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina or early-21st-century Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake? More generally, possible areas of inquiry might include:

How apocalyptic narratives offer fresh—or familiar—paradigms through which to consider modernity

The degree to which models of New World and Old, Global South and North, self and other are revolutionized and/or replicated in representations of apocalypse

How creative explorations of the end (or ends) of the world facilitate negotiations of the economic, cultural, and demographic shifts bringing, or promising, radical change in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century societies

Required Texts/Readings:

James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999)

Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

Junot Díaz, “Monstro” (2012)

Mat Johnson, Pym (2010)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

Anne Washburn, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012)

Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)

Films:

George Romero, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (2006)

Bong Joon Ho, Snowpiercer (2013)

Assignments:
Two short papers (4 pages each)30%

Research paper proposal (3-4 pages)15%

Final research paper (8-10 pages)35%

Oral presentation20%

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35865

Semester:  Fall 2018

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Long before the arrival of Red Rooster, Whole Foods, and other hip spots, there was another Harlem Renaissance, a time during the 1920s and 1930s when African American artistic and cultural life flourished with Harlem as its epicenter.  In this course we will draw upon nonfiction, fiction, and poetry not only to remember the Renaissance as traditionally portrayed in literary history, but also to re-member the movement, to piece together our own impressions of its people, places, and passions.  Who were the leading figures of the Renaissance?  What are the forgotten but no less important names?  How did the movement’s influence extend beyond the confines of upper Manhattan?  In addition to these questions, we will also address how literary production complemented and contrasted with the politics, music, and fine art of the period.  Our ultimate goal is not only to emerge with a broader picture of the Harlem Renaissance, but also to understand the period’s significance as a pivotal transition in African American literary expression, one bridging the gap between Reconstruction literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and urban literature of the mid-twentieth century.

Texts:  Nella Larsen, Passing; George Samuel Schuyler, Black No More; Jean Toomer, Cane; Course packet with short readings.

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses, 15%; Rough draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%.

Attendance is mandatory.  More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. The Haitian Revolution. Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address. Each of these historical events has been used to mark the beginnings of Black modernity, and each predates the literary period traditionally defined as modernism: the early- to mid-twentieth century. In launching a comparative discussion of modernisms in “Black Atlantic” literature, we will use this chronological disjuncture to address three fundamental questions: Given the dangers of essentialism, how does one create viable critical models for comparative studies of African diasporic literatures? How does the region’s colonial and economic history uniquely inflect the dynamic of “modernism” versus “modernity” in the Americas? What, keeping in mind canonical European and American literary models, denotes “modernism” in the African American and Francophone Caribbean literary traditions? From these broad inquiries we will move to a consideration of the artistic and political implications of Black Atlantic modernisms and the ways in which issues of form, content, and experimentation were often intertwined with those of race, gender, and identity. All texts will be available in English or English translation, and the list of readings is subject to change.

Proposed Texts

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

Jean Toomer, Cane

Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing

Claude McKay, Banjo

Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

René Maran, Batouala: véritable roman nègre (Batouala)

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land)

Suzanne Césaire, Le grand camouflage (The Great Camouflage)

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35640

Semester:  Fall 2017

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F, C L 323

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Through a survey of “classic” texts from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking islands, this course seeks to address the complexity of the Caribbean as a geographic construct, that is, the chain of islands stretching from North to South America, and as an imagined site, that is, the tropical destination marketed to North American and European tourists.  To do so we will supplement our reading of literary texts from the region with the examination of travel-related texts about the region.  Throughout the semester, we will consider how the dynamics of slavery and colonialism differed from island to island and explore the multiple manifestations of “postcolonial” life that have emerged across the archipelago since the 1960s.  The course will conclude with an examination of the migration of Caribbean authors and texts to the United States and of the resulting development of hyphenated Caribbean-American identities.  All texts will be read in English, and the list of proposed texts is subject to change.

Texts:  Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” What the Twilight Says; Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (Cuba, 1949); Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Martinique, 1939); Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Dominica, 1966); Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (Antigua, 1988); Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove (Guadeloupe, 1995);

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (8-10 pages), 35%; Reading journal, 15%; Rough draft, 10%.

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35715

Semester:  Fall 2017

Cross-lists:  LAH 350

Restrictions:  English Honors, Plan I Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  American writers have enjoyed a special relationship with the city of Paris since the birth of the United States.  Using a selection of authors from the 19^th- through 21^st centuries, this seminar will focus on African American expatriate experiences in Paris and greater France.  How did French philosophical and political ideals influence American literary visitors?  In what ways have stays in Paris challenged or deepened writers’ conceptions of American identity?  How do African American representations of French culture serve as both a window onto European mores and a reflection of North American tastes?  Our study will be organized according to three main periods—the Age of Revolutions, the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance, and Contemporary Paris—but writers whose work falls between these periods will be included as well.

Texts (subject to change):  Victor Séjour, “The Mulatto” (1837); Claude McKay, Banjo (1929); Jessie Redmon Fauset, Comedy: American Style (1933); James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956); Shay Youngblood, Black Girl in Paris (2000).

Essays and excerpts by W. E. B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Mary Church Terrell, Richard Wright, and others

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (4 pages each), 30%; Research paper proposal (4 pages), 15%; Final research paper (12-15 pages), 35%; Reading responses, 20%.

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  34815

Semester:  Spring 2017

Cross-lists:  AFR 317F

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description:  This course will survey the importance of place and community in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.  We will consider how the community in which characters live or move—from neighborhood to island—influences their conceptions of race, gender, and identity.  As this is a writing-intensive course, we will pay particular attention to the form as well as the content of our texts. Discussion will also play an integral role in the course.

Texts:  Readings may include the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Toni Morrison, Sula; Colson Whitehead, Zone One.

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (4 pages each): 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages): 25%; Rough draft (4 pages): 10%; Presentation: 10%; Reading responses and class participation: 15%.

Attendance is mandatory.  More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35425

Semester:  Spring 2017

Cross-lists:  AFR 372E, C L 323

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  In this course we will study the work of two of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the United States: Haitian American Edwidge Danticat and Dominican American Junot Díaz.  Between them Danticat (b. 1969) and Díaz (b. 1968) have won almost all of the major American cultural and literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize; and their work has been consistently published and reviewed in such high profile venues as the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times.  At the same time that their respective works speak to broader questions of American identity, however, Danticat and Díaz also write culturally specific narratives that explore the intricacies of what it means to be Haitian and Dominican, Haitian American and Dominican American, in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.  As a result, in addition to considering the qualities that have resulted in Danticat and Díaz’s elevation to the status of exemplary American authors, we will also examine how issues of gender, migration, history, and race factor into their work.

Texts (subject to change):  

General: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History; Michelle Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.

Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1995); The Farming of Bones (1998); Claire of the Sea Light (2013).

Junot Díaz: Drown (1996); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); This Is How You Lose Her (2012).

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (3-4 pages each), 40%; Final paper (5-7 pages), 35%; Rough draft & substantial revision (4 pages), 10%; Reading journal, 15%.

E 376M  l  The Harlem Renaissance

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35540

Semester:  Fall 2016

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Long before the arrival of Red Rooster and other hip restaurants and nightspots, there was another Harlem Renaissance, a time during the 1920s and 1930s when African American artistic and cultural life flourished with Harlem as its epicenter.  In this course we will draw upon nonfiction, fiction, and poetry not only to remember the Renaissance as traditionally portrayed in literary history, but also to re-member the movement, to piece together our own impressions of its people, places, and passions.  Who were the leading figures of the Renaissance?  What are the forgotten but no less important names?  How did the movement’s influence extend beyond the confines of upper Manhattan?  In addition to these questions, we will also address how literary production complemented and contrasted with the politics, music, and fine art of the period.  Our ultimate goal is not only to emerge with a broader picture of the Harlem Renaissance, but also to understand the period’s significance as a pivotal transition in African American literary expression, one bridging the gap between Reconstruction literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and urban literature of the mid-twentieth century.

Texts:  Nella Larsen, Passing; George Samuel Schuyler, Black No More; Jean Toomer, Cane; Course packet with short readings.

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses, 15%; Rough draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%.

Attendance is mandatory.  More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Haiti, History, and the American Imagination

Haiti is at once one of the most dismissed and most documented countries in the Western Hemisphere. According to conventional narratives of success and failure, Haiti is largely seen as a failed state, an underdeveloped nation that has not lived up to the promises of its 1804 Revolution. Despite such impressions, however, the culture and history of Haiti have captured the American—used here in a hemispheric sense—imagination to a degree rivaled by no other country (with, perhaps, the exception of the United States). Beginning with key theoretical texts and concluding with coverage of the January 2010 earthquake, this course will interrogate Caribbean, Latin American, and U.S. responses to and representations of Haiti. What were the repercussions of the 1804 Haitian Revolution in other slaveholding societies in the Americas? How was European Enlightenment philosophy in keeping with and antithetical to said revolution? What do literary and cinematic representations of Haiti tell readers and viewers about the home country of the author/filmmaker?  Has Haiti, even amidst the rich particularity of its culture and repeated contestation of its nationhood, been construed as a representative American site? These questions and others will be explored through selected readings from literature, literary theory, and political theory and viewings from documentary film and journalism.

Reading List (subject to change)

Isabel Allende, La isla bajo el mar (Island Beneath the Sea; 2009)

Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)

Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World; 1949)

Aimé Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe; 1963)

Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995)

Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953)

Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti” (1893)

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004)

Edouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint: théâtre (Monsieur Toussaint: A Play, 1961)

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938)

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)

Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997)

Press coverage of the January 2010 earthquake

E 376S  l  African American Literature since the Harlem Renaissance

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  34785

Semester:  Spring 2016

Cross-lists:  AFR 372E

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Using texts drawn from poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction, this course will examine the development of African American literature in the early-twenty-first century. Our primary focus will be themes of post-blackness and post-raciality. We will also consider how the international geographies of particular texts expand and complicate the category of “African American.”

Texts: Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self; Percival Everett, Erasure; Mat Johnson, Loving Day; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Colson Whitehead, Zone One.

Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Requirements & Grading: Peer review/Preliminary draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%; Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (6-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses 15%.

E 338  l  American Literature: From 1865 to the Present

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  34555

Semester:  Spring 2016

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: In this survey of American literature from the Civil War to the present, we will examine the construction and expansion of the U.S. literary canon. Of particular interest will be the expression of distinctly different “American” voices across regional, cultural, racial, and social boundaries. Our study will also include a consideration of how these voices are enhanced or tempered by the form and/or genre in which they are expressed.

Texts: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 7th edition, vols. C, D, E

Requirements & Grading: Three short expository essays (4 pages each): 45%; One draft of first expository essay (4 pages): 15%; Final exam: 25%; Reading responses/class participation: 15%.

Attendance is mandatory. More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

E 314V  l  1-African American Literature and Culture

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  33890

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  AFR 317F

Flags:  Cultural Diversity in the U.S.; Writing

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: One of the following: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: This course will survey the importance of place and community in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. We will consider how the community in which characters live or move—from neighborhood to island—influences their conceptions of race, gender, and identity. As this is a writing-intensive course, we will pay particular attention to the form as well as the content of our texts. Discussion will also play an integral role in the course.

Texts: Readings may include the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Toni Morrison, Sula; Colson Whitehead, Zone One.

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each): 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages): 25%; Rough draft (4 pages): 10%; Presentation: 10%; Reading responses and class participation: 15%.

Attendance is mandatory. More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

E 360L  l  2-Caribbean Literature

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  34560

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F, C L 323

Flags:  Global Cultures; Writing

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Through a survey of texts from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking islands, this course seeks to address the complexity of the Caribbean as a geographic construct, that is, the chain of islands stretching from North to South America, and as an imagined site, that is, the tropical destination marketed to North American and European tourists. To do so we will supplement our reading of literary texts from the region with the examination of travel-related texts about the region. Throughout the semester we will consider how the dynamics of slavery and colonialism differed from island to island and explore the multiple manifestations of “postcolonial” life that have emerged across the archipelago since the 1960s. The course will conclude with an examination of the migration of Caribbean authors and texts to the United States and of the resulting development of hyphenated Caribbean-American identities. All texts will be read in English, and the list of proposed texts is subject to change.

Texts: Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” What the Twilight Says; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge;Cristina García, Monkey Hunting;Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (8-10 pages), 25%; Reading journal, 15%; Rough draft, 10%, Class presentation, 10%.

Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. The Haitian Revolution. Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address. Each of these historical events has been used to mark the beginnings of Black modernity, and each predates the literary period traditionally defined as modernism: the early- to mid-twentieth century. In launching a comparative discussion of modernisms in “Black Atlantic” literature, we will use this chronological disjuncture to address three fundamental questions: Given the dangers of essentialism, how does one create viable critical models for comparative studies of African diasporic literatures? How does the region’s colonial and economic history uniquely inflect the dynamic of “modernism” versus “modernity” in the Americas? What, keeping in mind canonical European and American literary models, denotes “modernism” in the African American and Francophone Caribbean literary traditions? From these broad inquiries we will move to a consideration of the artistic and political implications of Black Atlantic modernisms and the ways in which issues of form, content, and experimentation were often intertwined with those of race, gender, and identity. All texts will be available in English or English translation, and the list of readings is subject to change.

Proposed Texts

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

Jean Toomer, Cane

Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing

Claude McKay, Banjo

Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

René Maran, Batouala: véritable roman nègre (Batouala)

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land)

Suzanne Césaire, Le grand camouflage (The Great Camouflage)

Michael Richardson, ed. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean

Requirements

Abstract of seminar paper

Position papers (6)

Presentation on assigned reading

Presentation on seminar paper

Seminar paper (15-20 pages)

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35110

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  AFR 317F

Flags:  Cultural Diversity; Writing

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: This course will survey the importance of place and community in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. We will consider how the community in which characters live or move—from neighborhood to island—influences their conceptions of race, gender, and identity. As this is a writing-intensive course, we will pay particular attention to the form as well as the content of our texts. Discussion will also play an integral role in the course.

Texts: Readings may include the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Toni Morrison, Sula; Colson Whitehead, Zone One.

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each): 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages): 25%; Rough draft (4 pages): 10%; Presentation: 10%; Reading responses and class participation: 15%.

Attendance is mandatory. More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  35795

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  AFR 372E, C L 323

Flags:  Cultural Diversity; Writing

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: In this course we will study the work of two of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the United States: Haitian American Edwidge Danticat and Dominican American Junot Díaz.  Between them Danticat (b. 1969) and Díaz (b. 1968) have won almost all of the major American cultural and literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize; and their work has been consistently published and reviewed in such high profile venues as the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times.  At the same time that their respective works speak to broader questions of American identity, however, Danticat and Díaz also write culturally specific narratives that explore the intricacies of what it means to be Haitian and Dominican, Haitian American and Dominican American, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  As a result, in addition to considering the qualities that have resulted in Danticat and Díaz’s elevation to the status of exemplary American authors, we will also examine how issues of gender, migration, history, and race factor into their work.

Texts (subject to change):

General: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History; Michelle Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.

Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1995); The Farming of Bones (1998); The Dew Breaker (2004); Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Claire of the Sea Light (2013).

Junot Díaz: Drown (1996); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); This Is How You Lose Her (2012).

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (3-4 pages each), 40%; Final paper (5-7 pages), 25%; Presentation, 15%; Rough draft & substantial revision (4 pages), 10%; Reading journal, 10%.

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #:  36195

Semester:  Spring 2014

Cross-lists:  AFR 372E

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Using texts drawn from poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction, this course will examine the development of African American literature in the early-twenty-first century. Our primary focus will be themes of post-blackness and post-raciality. We will also consider how the international geographies of particular texts expand and complicate the category of “African American.”

Texts: Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self; Percival Everett, Erasure; Mat Johnson, Pym; Tayari Jones, Leaving Atlanta; Colson Whitehead, Zone One.

Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Requirements & Grading: Peer review/Preliminary draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%; Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (6-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses, 15%.

Instructor:  Wilks, J            Areas:  -- / A

Unique #:  35035            Flags:  Cultural diversity, Writing

Semester:  Fall 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  AFR 317F            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: This course will survey the importance of place and community in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. We will consider how the community in which characters live or move—from neighborhood to island—influences their conceptions of race, gender, and identity. As this is a writing-intensive course, we will pay particular attention to the form as well as the content of our texts. Discussion will also play an integral role in the course.

Texts: Readings may include the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Toni Morrison, Sula; Colson Whitehead, Zone One.

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each): 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages): 25%; Rough draft (4 pages): 10%; Presentation: 10%; Reading responses and class participation: 15%.

Attendance is mandatory. More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Instructor:  Wilks, J            Areas:  II / G

Unique #:  35960            Flags:  Cultural Diversity, Writing

Semester:  Fall 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Long before the late-twentieth century arrival of Starbucks and Clintons, there was another Harlem Renaissance, a time during the 1920s and 1930s when African American artistic and cultural life flourished with Harlem as its epicenter. In this course we will draw upon nonfiction, fiction, and poetry not only to remember the Renaissance as traditionally portrayed in literary history, but also to re-member the movement, to piece together our own impressions of its people, places, and passions. Who were the leading figures of the Renaissance? What are the forgotten but no less important names? How did the movement’s influence extend beyond the confines of upper Manhattan? In addition to these questions, we will also address how literary production complemented and contrasted with the politics, music, and fine art of the period. Our ultimate goal is not only to emerge with a broader picture of the Harlem Renaissance, but also to understand the period’s significance as a pivotal transition in African American literary expression, one bridging the gap between Reconstruction literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and urban literature of the mid-twentieth century.

Texts: Nella Larsen, Passing; George Samuel Schuyler, Black No More; Jean Toomer, Cane; Venetria Patton and Maureen Honey, Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology.

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses, 15%; Rough draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%.

Attendance is mandatory. More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Instructor:  Wilks, J            Areas:  V / G

Unique #:  35535            Flags:  Global cultures, Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F, C L 323            Computer Instruction:  No

Only one of the following may be counted: E 360L (Topic: Caribbean Literature), 379N (Topic: Caribbean Literature), 379S (embedded topic: Caribbean Literature).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Through a survey of texts from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking islands, this course seeks to address the complexity of the Caribbean as a geographic construct, that is, the chain of islands stretching from North to South America, and as an imagined site, that is, the tropical destination marketed to North American and European tourists. To do so we will supplement our reading of literary texts from the region with the examination of travel-related texts about the region. Throughout the semester we will consider how the dynamics of slavery and colonialism differed from island to island and explore the multiple manifestations of “postcolonial” life that have emerged across the archipelago since the 1960s. The course will conclude with an examination of the migration of Caribbean authors and texts to the United States and of the resulting development of hyphenated Caribbean-American identities. All texts will be read in English, and the list of proposed texts is subject to change.

Texts: Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” What the Twilight Says; Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (8-10 pages), 25%; Reading journal, 15%; Rough draft, 10%, Class presentation, 10%.

Instructor:  Wilks, J            Areas:  n/a

Unique #:  35045-35090            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature, Culture, and Identity --

The goal of this course is to study American literature in the fullest sense of the phrase; that is, literature produced by Americans of African, Asian, European, Latina/o, and Native descent. Using the themes of immigration and migration as its focal points, our survey opens with the 17th-century Puritan community depicted in Arthur Miller’s play and closes with a return to a very different Massachusetts, that of the 20th-century Bengali immigrants featured in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection. The primary texts will be supplemented with cultural and historical materials to help contextualize readings.

Texts: Arthur Miller, The Crucible; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Course packet of supplemental readings.

Requirements & Grading: Four exams, with short answer and essay questions, which cover the four general periods that we will be studying.

Instructor:  Wilks, J            Areas:  II / G

Unique #:  35490            Flags:  Cultural diversity; Writing

Semester:  Spring 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  AFR 374F            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Using texts drawn from poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction, this course will examine the development of African American literature in the early-twenty-first century. Our primary focus will be themes of post-blackness and post-raciality. We will also consider how the international geographies of particular texts expand and complicate the category of “African American.” 

Texts: Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self; Percival Everett, Erasure; Mat Johnson, Pym; Danzy Senna, You Are Free; Martha Southgate, The Taste of Salt; Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt.

Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Requirements & Grading: Peer review/Preliminary draft of first short paper (4 pages), 10%; Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (6-7 pages), 35%; Reading responses, 15%.

Attendance is mandatory.  More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Haiti, History, and the American Imagination

Haiti is at once one of the most dismissed and most documented countries in the Western Hemisphere.  According to conventional narratives of success and failure, Haiti is largely seen as a failed state, an underdeveloped nation that has not lived up to the promises of its 1804 Revolution.  Despite such impressions, however, the culture and history of Haiti have captured the American—used here in a hemispheric sense—imagination to a degree rivaled by no other country (with, perhaps, the exception of the United States).  Beginning with key theoretical texts and concluding with coverage of the January 2010 earthquake, this course will interrogate Caribbean, Latin American, and U.S. responses to and representations of Haiti.  What were the repercussions of the 1804 Haitian Revolution in other slaveholding societies in the Americas?  How was European Enlightenment philosophy in keeping with and antithetical to said revolution?  What do literary and cinematic representations of Haiti tell readers and viewers about the home country of the author/filmmaker?  Has Haiti, even amidst the rich particularity of its culture and repeated contestation of its nationhood, been construed as a representative American site?  These questions and others will be explored through selected readings from literature, literary theory, and political theory and viewings from documentary film and journalism.

Texts may include the following:

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938)

Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997)

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004)

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004)

Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)

Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)

Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti” (1893)

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938)

Arna Bontemps, Drums at Dusk (1939)

Alejo Carpentier, El Reino de Este Mundo (The Kingdom of This World; 1949)

Edouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint (1961)

Aimé Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe; 1963)

Madison Smart Bell, All Souls’ Rising (1995)

Derek Walcott, The Haitian Trilogy (2002)

Isabel Allende, Island Beneath the Sea (La isla bajo el mar; 2009)

Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985)

Press coverage of the January 2010 earthquake

Only one of the following may be counted: E 360L (Topic: Caribbean Literature), 379N (Topic: Caribbean Literature), 379S (embedded topic: Caribbean Literature).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Through a survey of “classic” texts from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking islands, this course seeks to address the complexity of the Caribbean as a geographic construct, that is, the chain of islands stretching from North to South America, and as an imagined site, that is, the tropical destination marketed to North American and European tourists. To do so we will supplement our reading of literary texts from the region with the examination of travel-related texts about the region. Throughout the semester we will consider how the dynamics of slavery and colonialism differed from island to island and explore the multiple manifestations of “postcolonial” life that have emerged across the archipelago since the 1960s. The course will conclude with an examination of the migration of Caribbean authors and texts to the United States and of the resulting development of hyphenated Caribbean-American identities. All texts will be read in English, and the list of proposed texts is subject to change. 

Texts: Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” What the Twilight Says; Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

Requirements & Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (8-10 pages), 25%; Reading journal, 15%; Rough draft, 10%, Class presentation, 10%.

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature, Culture, and Identity --

The goal of this course is to study American literature in the fullest sense of the phrase; that is, literature produced by Americans of African, Asian, European, Latina/o, and Native descent. Using the themes of immigration and migration as its focal points, our survey opens with the 17th-century Puritan community depicted in Arthur Miller’s play and closes with a return to a very different Massachusetts, that of the 20th-century Bengali immigrants featured in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection. The primary texts will be supplemented with cultural and historical materials to help contextualize readings. 

Texts: Arthur Miller, The Crucible; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Course packet of supplemental readings.

Requirements & Grading: Four exams, with short answer and essay questions, which cover the four general periods that we will be studying.

Cross-listed with AFR 317F

Course Description: This course will survey the importance of place and community in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. We will consider how the community in which characters live or move—from neighborhood to island—influences their conceptions of race, gender, and identity. As this is a writing-intensive course, we will pay particular attention to the style as well as the content of our texts. Discussion will also play an integral role in the course.

Texts: Readings may include the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Toni Morrison, Sula; Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt.

Grading: Three short papers (4 pages each): 45%; Final critical essay (5-7 pages): 25%; Rough draft (4 pages): 15%; Reading responses and class participation: 15%. Attendance is mandatory. More than three unexcused absences will result in a significant reduction of your grade.

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Cross-listed with C L 323, AFR 374F

 Only one of the following may be counted: E 360L (Topic: Caribbean Literature), 379N (Topic: Caribbean Literature), 379S (embedded topic: Caribbean Literature).

Course Description: Through a survey of texts from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking islands, this course seeks to address the complexity of “the Caribbean” as a geographic construct, that is, the chain of islands stretching from North to South America, and as an imagined site, that is, the tropical destination marketed to North American and European tourists. To do so we will supplement our reading of literary texts from the region with the examination of travel-related texts about the region. Throughout the semester we will consider how the dynamics of slavery and colonialism differed from island to island and explore the multiple manifestations of “postcolonial” life that have emerged across the archipelago since the 1960s. The course will conclude with an examination of the migration of Caribbean authors and texts to the United States and of the resulting development of hyphenated Caribbean-American identities. All texts will be read in English, and the list of proposed texts is subject to change.

Texts: Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” What the Twilight Says; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge; Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent; Cristina García, Monkey Hunting; Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Grading: Two short papers (4 pages each), 40%; Final critical essay (8-10 pages), 25%; Reading journal, 20%; Rough draft, 15%.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Course Description

Long before the late-twentieth century arrival of Starbucks and Clintons, there was another Harlem Renaissance, a time during the 1920s and 1930s when African American artistic and cultural life flourished with Harlem as its epicenter.  In this course we will draw upon nonfiction, fiction, and poetry not only to remember the Renaissance as traditionally portrayed in literary history, but also to re-member the movement, to piece together our own impressions of its people, places, and passions.  Who were the leading figures of the Renaissance?  What are the forgotten but no less important names?  How did the movement’s influence extend beyond the confines of upper Manhattan?  In addition to these questions, we will also address how literary production complemented and contrasted with the politics, music, and fine art of the period.  Our ultimate goal is not only to emerge with a broader picture of the Harlem Renaissance, but also to understand the period’s significance as a pivotal transition in African American literary expression, one bridging the gap between Reconstruction literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and urban literature of the mid-twentieth century.

Texts

Nella Larsen, Passing
George Samuel Schuyler, Black No More
Jean Toomer, Cane
Venetria Patton and Maureen Honey, Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (DT)

Grading

Plus/minus grading will be used. The grading scale can be found on the course Blackboard site.

University Policy Notes

* Academic Integrity

“A fundamental principle for any educational institution, academic integrity is highly valued and seriously regarded at The University of Texas at Austin, as emphasized in the standards of conduct. More specifically, you and other students are expected to ‘maintain absolute integrity and a high standard of individual honor in scholastic work’ undertaken at the University (Sec. 11-801, Institutional Rules on Student Services and Activities). This is a very basic expectation that is further reinforced by the University's Honor Code. At a minimum, you should complete any assignments, exams, and other scholastic endeavors with the utmost honesty, which requires you to:

• acknowledge the contributions of other sources to your scholastic efforts;
• complete your assignments independently unless expressly authorized to seek or obtain assistance in preparing them;ollow instructions for assignments and exams, and observe the standards of your academic discipline; and
• avoid engaging in any form of academic dishonesty on behalf of yourself or another student.”

This passage quoted from and additional information available at http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/sjs/acint_student.php

* Disabilities

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, by calling 471-6259.

* Religious holidays

A student who misses an examination, work assignment, or other project due to the observance of a religious holy day will be given an opportunity to complete the work missed within a reasonable time after the absence, provided that he or she has properly notified the instructor. It is the policy of the University of Texas at Austin that the student must notify the instructor at least 14 days prior to the classes scheduled on dates he or she will be absent to observe a religious holy day. For religious holy days that fall within the first two weeks of the semester, the notice should be given on the first day of the semester. The student will not be penalized for these excused absences, but the instructor may appropriately respond if the student fails to complete satisfactorily the missed assignment or examination within a reasonable time after the excused absence.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.

¤ Course Description

Using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby (1925) and Joseph O’Neill’s critically acclaimed Netherland (2008) as historical bookends, this course will explore post-Civil War American literature through the concept of the “American Dream.”  Our central concern will be that of how national perceptions of individual success and collective belonging have changed from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first.  Are there limits—social, economic, and otherwise—to the self-fashioning that is central to this dream?  How did the suburbanization of the 1950s and 1960s alter U.S. notions of the ideal life?  Finally, how have immigration and globalization reshaped not only what is means to “arrive,” but also what it means to be “American”?  Indeed, can one still speak of such a nationally specific concept in our post-9/11, “borderless” world?

¤ Texts

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (1996)
Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (2008)

¤ University Policy Notes

* Academic Integrity *

“A fundamental principle for any educational institution, academic integrity is highly valued and seriously regarded at The University of Texas at Austin, as emphasized in the standards of conduct. More specifically, you and other students are expected to ‘maintain absolute integrity and a high standard of individual honor in scholastic work’ undertaken at the University (Sec. 11-801, Institutional Rules on Student Services and Activities). This is a very basic expectation that is further reinforced by the University's Honor Code. At a minimum, you should complete any assignments, exams, and other scholastic endeavors with the utmost honesty, which requires you to:

• acknowledge the contributions of other sources to your scholastic efforts;
• complete your assignments independently unless expressly authorized to seek or obtain assistance in preparing them;
• follow instructions for assignments and exams, and observe the standards of your academic discipline; and
• avoid engaging in any form of academic dishonesty on behalf of yourself or another student.”

This passage quoted from and additional information available at http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/sjs/acint_student.php

* Disabilities *

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, by calling 471-6259.

* Religious Holidays *

A student who misses an examination, work assignment, or other project due to the observance of a religious holy day will be given an opportunity to complete the work missed within a reasonable time after the absence, provided that he or she has properly notified the instructor. It is the policy of the University of Texas at Austin that the student must notify the instructor at least 14 days prior to the classes scheduled on dates he or she will be absent to observe a religious holy day. For religious holy days that fall within the first two weeks of the semester, the notice should be given on the first day of the semester. The student will not be penalized for these excused absences, but the instructor may appropriately respond if the student fails to complete satisfactorily the missed assignment or examination within a reasonable time after the excused absence.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.

Please check back for updates.

TBD

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Please check back for updates.