2012-2013 Academic Catalog

Nov 23, 2024

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 276 - Ethnic America: Literary and Theoretical Perspectives

Type of Course: Seminar

This seminar investigates the ways in which the “American” and the “ethnic” continue to be perceived as mutually exclusive identity categories in contemporary U.S. fiction. Despite the nation’s longstanding history as a nation of immigrants and its forecasted future as the most multiethnic and multilingual country in the world, the U.S. continues to resist the incorporation of its ethnic populations through overt and covert means of division, estrangement, and discrimination. Students will read a wide range of texts by “ethnic” and “nonethnic” writers and theorists to explore the ways in which the nation’s ethnic constituents are continually changing the definitions of its national identity, and to consider whether the American/ethnic dichotomy is real or imagined. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (C-3) requirement.

Prerequisites: Verbal expression (VE) course