2018-2019 Academic Catalog

Apr 18, 2024

2018-2019 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 276 - Ethnic America: Literature, Theory, Politics

This seminar investigates the ways in which ethnicity is constructed, lived, and contested in contemporary U.S. literature, identity politics, and popular culture. We will focus primarily on works by and about “ethnics” in recent decades that critique the ways in which literary figurations of the “ethnic” and the “American” evolve in relation to one another in response to the vicissitudes of American racial, gender, class, and national politics. The course moves through units organized around the following topics and themes: immigration and diaspora; transnationalism and globalization; internal and semi-colonization; aesthetics and politics; cultural consent and descent; symbolic ethnicity; model and un-model minorities; history and memorialization; border politics and labor; ethnic humor; and “post-ethnicity.” This course fulfills core requirements in the English major and minor, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies concentration, and Asian Studies concentration. It also fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion requirement. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement.

Prerequisites: VE Placement

Course Designation/Attribute: DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Every other year