Close analysis and discussion of individual texts lead students to consider variations of these factors between countries and time periods. This course focuses on contemporary multicultural children's literature and requires students to learn and apply appropriate interpretive strategies for understanding the texts and cultural contexts. Students gain and demonstrate a firm understanding of the major critical issues regarding multicultural children's literature and formulate and support personal responses to these issues. Students explore the historical, cultural, political, and social milieu that shaped each writer and text. This seminar explores the works of poets such as Auden, H.D., Lowell, Plath, Roethke, Kinnell, Rich, Heaney, Bishop, Walcott, and Hughes.
Students make presentations on assigned topics.
Attendance at live and filmed poetry readings is a feature of the course. In this seminar students read plays from such traditions as the realist, the symbolist, and the expressionist, including works by Yeats, Pirandello, Beckett, Pinter, and Mamet. Students take a global approach to women's stories of growing up found in autobiographies, novels, short stories, and poetry. An invigorating exploration, this course includes works by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Nawal El Saadawi, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Anchee Min, Georgina Valoyce Sanches, Esmeralda Santiago, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jeanette Winterson, and Banana Yoshimoto. Much of this literature is appropriate for use in the high school classroom.