This course will examine the ideas, issues, questions and experiences detailed in the powerful writings of Carol Bulosan, Gloria Naylor, James Welch, Jack Forbes, and Bharati Mukherjee. We will explore their individual struggles to survive in American, as well as American's response to those struggles. Several essay-tests are required. In the Trickster of Liberty Gerald Vizenor has great and necessary fun with the Oregon Trail commemorative coin. Our texts will include James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Washington Irving's Astoria, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne's the Blithedale Romance, and Samuel Clemen's Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Students can expect to sit a number of exams and write an essay or two.
We shall consider plays both as written texts and, whenever possible via videotape, as performance. In this course, we will read, discuss, and analyze the poetry of women. This course focuses upon some interpretive strategies in, for instance, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and cultural materialism. In reading both theory and criticism along with several specific literary texts, we will examine how literary criticism is fashioned, what is at stake in its arguments, and why literary criticism provides its own unique kinds of political, philosophical, and poetic knowledge. A CORE course for the English Major A survey of Modern and Contemporary Literary Criticism and Theory from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism.