51 - 60 of 387 results for: ENGLISH

Emerging from the demographic, political, and cultural shifts of the late twentieth century, LatinX Literature flourishes in the twenty-first century as a hemispherically American corpus of texts. Like both ChicanX and Puerto Rican literatures before it, LatinX Literature emerges from various movements for social justice to challenge both the Anglo and the Hispanic established literary traditions of the Americas. As a transnational, pluralistic, heterogeneous, and dynamic category that considers the writings of diverse peoples with cultural ties to Latin America residing in the U.S., it complicates and transgresses the linguistic, geopolitical and cultural borders of the Americas, including those of the Afro-Caribbean, Luso-Brazilian, and the Native First Nations. Aligning itself with the issues, styles, and topics of the Global South, LatinX Literature is a product of the kind of 'border thinking' that critic Walter Mignolo has described as a 'pluriversal epistemology that interconnects the plurality and diversity of decolonial projects.' Acknowledging its emergence from literal and theoretical border spaces and decolonizing epistemologies, the 'X' of LatinX intentionally inflects the link to an origin in LGBTQI discourses signifying 'a more inclusive, non-gender-binary designation for LatinX peoples' and as a border literature that articulates heterogeneous ways of making meaning. Authors may include Jesus Colón, Sandra Cisneros, Helena Maria Viramontes, Christina Garcia, Junot Diaz, Ire´ne Lara Silva, Julia Alvarez, Américo Paredes, Daniel Alarcón, Francisco Goldman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Tato Laviera, Ernesto Quinonez, Erika Sanchez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Luis Valdez, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Fernando Flores, or Oscar Cásares. NOTE: English majors must take this class for 5 units.

What can eight great novels tell us about the people, politics, and places of the long twentieth century? How can we read historically, comparatively, contextually and contemporaneously all at once? One way of tackling the world building form of the novel is by pairing novels that rewrite, adapt, echo, speak with, talk back to or otherwise take flight from predecessor texts. The idea that a novel is not contained by its own papery walls compels us to think critically about cultural (dis)inheritances, discursive legacies, genre reinvention, and cultural mythmaking. This course will engage core literary historical questions of voice, style, form and content, description, character, point of view, and narrative context in four paired novels as they speak to one another (and much else) across time and place: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005); Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1999); EM Forster's Howards End (1910) and Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005). You will learn to read closely and with precision, and to write with specificity, exactitude, imagination and rigor.

Introductory course to major themes and trends within Asian American literature. This course will cover plays, novels, and poems, alongside historical documents, newspaper clips, and films to consider how these different genres create parallel, and at times contradictory, narratives about what we have come to call Asian America. We will interrogate various forms of Asian American representation: political, cultural, and literary, and consider how these genres make Asian American fictions not necessarily fantasy, but fantastic in the way they traverse between reality and representation.

In this seminar, we will explore and theorize 'the taboo' and the consequences for transgressing taboos. On our quest, we will read broadly--from William Shakespeare's drama Othello to Christina Rossetti's poem 'Goblin Market' to Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime--to see how taboos around issues such as race, gender, and sexuality change and carry across different cultural, historical, geographical, and familial contexts. This class fulfills the WRITE 2 requirement.

Did you know that the emperor Charlemagne was illiterate, yet his scribes revolutionized writing in the West? This course follows decisive moments in the history of media and communication, asking how new recording technologies reshaped a society in which most people did not read or write--what has been described as the shift "from memory to written record." To understand this transformation, we examine forms of oral literature and music, from the Viking sagas, the call to crusade, and medieval curses (Benedictine maledictions), to early popular authors such as Dante and the 15th-century feminist scribe, Christine de Pizan. We trace the impact of musical notation, manuscript and book production, and Gutenberg's print revolution. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, how did the medium shape the message? Along the way, we will consider how the medieval arts of memory and divine reading (lectio divina) can inform communication in the digital world. This is a hands-on course: students will handle medieval manuscripts and early printed books in Special Collections, and will participate in an "ink-making workshop," following medieval recipes for ink and for cutting quills, then using them to write on parchment. The course is open to all interested students.

This class looks at the tradition of the imagined universe in fiction and poetry. Special topics include magical realism, artificial intelligence, and dystopias. Primary focus on giving students a skill set to tap into their own creativity. Opportunities for students to explore their creative strengths, develop a vocabulary with which to discuss their own creativity, and experiment with the craft and adventure of their own writing.

How can you craft a story from the real? This course will give you the skills, strategies, and support to create your own interview and research-based piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction). Students will hone the practice of listening, recording, asking questions and writing. We'll deep dive on dialogue, structure, and look at different strategies for making art based on interviews. We'll study seminal texts, and over the course, students will create their own piece of reality-based writing. We'll look at graphic novels, verbatim theatre (texts crafted from interviews), poetry, autofiction, photography and film. From the musical London Road, to Anna Deveare Smith's ground-breaking documentary theatre, to Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's masterpiece novels of voice - all are crafted narratives based on people's real words. What might you investigate and create? We'll all work alongside each other, crafting, workshopping, and shaping your own project from the initial idea to the final project. We'll consider how to choose a strong overall topic, what makes a good question, various ways of gathering and notating material, and how to shape raw text into something that lifts off into story and art. Discover what's possible when you work from the material of real life.

Have human beings ruined the world? Was it war, or industry, or consumerism, or something else that did it? Beginning with an in-depth exploration of some of the key works of literary modernism, this class will trace the image of the devastated landscape as it develops over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, arriving finally at literary representations of the contemporary zombie apocalypse. Authors to include T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, and others.

The vast majority of novels feature a central protagonist, or a cast of characters whose interactions play out over weeks or months. But some stories overflow our life spans, and cannot be truthfully told without the novelist reaching far back in time. In this Sophomore Seminar, we will consider three novels that seek to tell larger, more ambitious stories that span decades and continents. In the process, we will discuss how novelists build believable worlds, craft memorable characters, keep us engaged as readers, and manage such ambitious projects.