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32114
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Lecture-Discussion
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C
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10:00AM
-11:50AM
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W
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125 English Building
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Hutner, G
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/14/13-05/01/13
- Special Approval:
- Departmental Approval Required
- Section Title:
- Race, Ethnicity & Amer Fiction
- Section Info:
- Topic Section C: Race, Ethnicity and Contemporary American Fiction We will explore our topic, Race and Ethnicity in the 21st-Century American Novel, through a diverse range of novels devoted to minority experience in the US. Each of our novels will focus on the experiences shaping contemporary racial or ethnic identity, though the books are chosen less for their representativeness and more for their participation in both historical and contemporary contexts for reading ethnic and racial writing in America. So students can expect to find that the novels all treat the issues challenging minority cultures in the US in very recent formulations. While not the last word on the subject, each novel aims to bring us up to date on some defining anxieties that minority citizen?s share. Those concerns may well be individual and private, but as we will also see, they are also general and public. Plus, each of the various novels might be seen as engaged in a conversation with the others on our syllabus, about the larger complexities of racial or ethnic identity. The novels may be from the last decade, but their power of retrospect sometimes goes back generations. And that can be a contemporary story too. Even as we will be coming familiar with these collective and specific concerns, we will also be learning about (mostly young) novelists practicing their craft in much the same historical, socioeconomic and even political environment that students share. Many of these writers may not yet be known to you, but each has won or has been a finalist for a prestigious prize, earning significant recognition outside of academe. In an important sense, students will be reading writers who heretofore have been largely unstudied but who may well be among the best-known writers of the next decade. Typically, we will examine these books through a multiple set of lenses: how they participate in their individual traditions (what they have in common with other works from the same group; how they differ), their larger commonality with contemporary fiction, social and historical specificity (trends in immigration; place in naturalization debates). We will also be looking at the books? reception: how were they greeted by reviewers? What are the initial critical premises for their study? What have the reviewers recognized or missed? A significant feature of the course will be for students to work on a research project to be developed in consultation with the professor.
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32113
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Lecture-Discussion
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X
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12:00PM
-1:50PM
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M
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309 English Building
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Mohamed, F
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/14/13-05/01/13
- Special Approval:
- Departmental Approval Required
- Section Title:
- Lit to Bill of Rights
- Section Info:
- Topic Section X: Literature from the Petition of Right to the Bill of Rights It is often said that England has an unwritten constitution. That is both true and untrue. The tumults of England?s seventeenth century are in many respects constitutional struggles over the location of political sovereignty, the validity of the royal prerogative, the powers of the lords temporal and spiritual, and the extension of suffrage in the ?commons?. The two documents bracketing this course draw attention to legislative attempts to settle such issues: Sir Edward Coke and John Selden?s Petition of Right in 1628, which sought to stem the autocratic impulses of King Charles I; and the Bill of Rights of 1689, which solidified the power exercised by Parliament in the Glorious Revolution. We will also look at the most comprehensive attempts to codify the English constitution, the Instrument of Government and Humble Petition and Advice passed under Oliver Cromwell?s Protectorate. As we might expect, these legislative measures are a faint reflection of the period?s very lively debates on political liberties, which include calls for greater democracy, debates on censorship, sustained dialogue on religious freedom, and interrogations of the subjugation of women. We shall read such radical voices as those of the Levellers and Diggers?who call for universal suffrage and implement early communism, respectively. We shall see in the chaotic twenty months following the death of Cromwell an explosion of recommendations on settling an English republic: from the Machiavellian republican tradition that finds English expression in the work of Sir James Harrington, to the meritocratic oligarchy of the younger Sir Henry Vane, to the Presbyterian theocracy of Richard Baxter. These run against the still-current patriarchal theory of political order, which we will see in Sir Robert Filmer, and the strident claims for the sovereign authority of Thomas Hobbes? influential Leviathan. Such political concerns register themselves in this course?s literary figures, all of whom occupy positions very near the heart of political power: Sir William Davenant, the court playwright struggling to make work for himself in the Interregnum; John Donne, who as a prominent preacher in the national church promoted its position on civil obedience; John Milton, the first English thinker to defend the execution of Charles I and the new regime?s most important propagandist; and Andrew Marvell, recently and persuasively described as a ?chameleon? blending into his political background, whether as Milton?s colleague in Cromwell?s government or as a Member of Parliament in the Restoration. These writers reveal how political unrest changes the business of cultural production, and also how in this period political crises are also and necessarily literary crises.
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