UNDERGRADUATE FLYER
SPRING 2018
ENG. 2060: Study of American Literature (11888)
American Literature and the Monstrous
ONLINE
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This online course will examine how representations of witches, vampires, cannibals, and monsters have shaped American cultural discourse and literary history. Reading texts by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and the contemporary novelist Seth Grahame-Smith, we will ask why monsters play such an important role in our cultural imagination. What is a monster? How do individuals and societies define themselves in relation to the monstrous? What can monsters tell us about humanity, community, and our deepest fears and values? For questions please email Dr. Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.
ENG 2100: Literature and Culture (11887)
New York Modern
ONLINE
Dr. John Lowney
This course explores 1910s and 1920s New York City as a metropolitan site of cultural hybridity and emergent modernisms. While considering the literary cultures that distinguished New York in the 1910s and 20s (for example, in Greenwich Village and Harlem), the course emphasizes the intercultural, interracial, and international formations of the period. We will discuss in particular the impact of mass culture on modernisms in the United States, as we examine the relationship of literature to the visual arts, film, and music, particularly jazz. Readings will include fiction (John Dos Passos, Manhatttan Transfer; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Claude McKay, Home To Harlem), drama (Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones), and poetry (Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes).
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (15161)
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Robert Forman
Our course will introduce beginning English majors to the varied approaches one finds in modern literary criticism. Formalism, New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, Reader-Response, Structuralism and Deconstruction as well as more recent emphases on culture-based methods like Feminist, Post-Colonial, Gender and Queer Theory, and Critical Race Theory will serve as tools against which we will analyze a variety of prose texts.
In the second half of the semester we will turn to poetry and look particularly at figurative language and meters. Students will acquire a working knowledge of figurative terms as well as the most commonly meters.
Finally, we will introduce students to both traditional and digital research methods and conclude with a research exercise based on the student’s choice of one of the works previously discussed.
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (15170)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Amy King
How do we discuss and write about literature? This course reflects upon and seeks to refine our understanding of what constitutes literary argument and evidence in the academic discipline of English. Since this course serves as part of the English department’s requirements for future work in literary studies, the primary objective of this course is to prepare you for this work as an English major or minor. Emphasis will be placed on sharpening traditional close-reading skills across a variety of genres, including the primary genres of the discipline: poetry, drama, and narrative fiction. The course will emphasize learning how to write effectively for the discipline of English. How to read and write about texts that may be culturally and historically distant from us will be a primary concern as well.
Ideally you will leave this class with the following: 1) a conscious understanding of genre and historical periods in the field of English; 2) the ability to aesthetically appreciate, talk thoughtfully about, and interpret literary texts using basic skills of analysis commonly used in the field of English studies; 3) facility with producing analytical writing based on an understanding of literary argumentation and analysis; 4) knowledge of how to do secondary critical research within the field of English, and how to use literary criticism to complicate your own analysis.
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (15154)
Texts and Contexts in 19th-Century Poetry and Fiction
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Gregory Maertz
This course seeks to develop signature skills associated with literary and cultural studies, such as analyzing and contextualizing aesthetic artifacts in social, political, and ideological structures, constructing historical and critical arguments, and pursuing research projects. The course material will be drawn from the Romantic and Victorian Periods (c. 1789-1901) and include poetry by William Blake, John Keats, and P. B. Shelley, and prose fiction by Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Bram Stoker.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (13584)
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Scott Combs
This course introduces students to major works of critical theory. We will read exemplary essays from different theoretical paradigms, including psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. What is different about this iteration of the course is its occasional emphasis on film and film theory. Our goal throughout will not be to “apply” the theory we read to objects, but rather to see theoretical work in practice, and to appreciate the persistence of certain ideas and problems. We will take as an object for reflection both film and literature. To that end, this version of English 2300 will be useful if you are interested in taking further classes in film and media studies. We will be watching a few clips and select films in class.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (15147)
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Scott Combs
This course introduces students to major works of critical theory. We will read exemplary essays from different theoretical paradigms, including psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. What is different about this iteration of the course is its occasional emphasis on film and film theory. Our goal throughout will not be to “apply” the theory we read to objects, but rather to see theoretical work in practice, and to appreciate the persistence of certain ideas and problems. We will take as an object for reflection both film and literature. To that end, this version of English 2300 will be useful if you are interested in taking further classes in film and media studies. We will be watching a few clips and select films in class.
ENG. 3190: Special Topics in Medieval Literature (15150)
Sex, Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature
*DIVISION I*
TF 12:15-1:40 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
This course introduces a range of texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, including bawdy French tales (fabliaux), the life of holy woman Christina of Markyate, the lais of Marie de France, the romance of the cross-dressed heroine Silence, and selected Chaucerian tales. We will read the medieval works together with critical writings on medieval anatomical theory, misogyny, marriage, religion, and sexual practices. How did medieval writers use different literary genres to define, confront, or subvert assumptions about sex difference and gender roles? What forms of power were available to men and women in particular social, religious, and political settings? Most fundamentally, we will investigate how medieval women and men defined themselves and each other in literary conversation and struggle.
ENG. 3250: Victorian Literature (15417)
*DIVISION II*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Gregory Maertz
In this course we will study examples of major sub-genres of the Victorian novel, including novels of realism, science fiction, and the Gothic. We will place special emphasis on the impact of philosophy and eugenics on literary innovation toward the end of the nineteenth century. The novels we will examine shall include George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Additionally, for purposes of contextualization, we will read and discuss Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, and Max Nordau’s Degeneration.
ENG. 3290: Special Topics: Eighteenth-Century Black Lives (13588)
*DIVISION II*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will explore literary representations of black lives from the 1680s to 1790s, a period that includes the flourishing of the Atlantic slave trade and English colonization of the Caribbean as well as the emergence of Christian anti-slavery protest and the political rise of abolitionism. We’ll encounter a range of purposes and attitudes in these texts: clinical descriptions of slave labor, theological humanitarianism, sentimental exoticism, anti-imperial critique, the autobiographical abolitionism of freed slaves. We will think about the modes of argument available to writers representing blackness in an era when the concept of rights extended only to property-owning Christian European men. When equal rights could not yet be claimed as a persuasive logic for ceasing the trade in black bodies, how was the sovereignty of black life imagined? What discourses were available to English writers arguing for the value of these lives? Alternately, on what grounds was their value diminished? How was black freedom imagined? To what degree did black writers absorb or reject English abolitionist rhetoric? Texts will include fictional narratives (Aphra Behn’s Oronooko and the anonymous The Woman of Colour); abolitionist polemics (Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery); poetry by Hannah More, Anna Barbauld, Phyllis Wheatley, William Cowper, and William Blake; letters and essays by Joseph Addison, Ignatius Sancho, and Samuel Johnson. We will seek connections with racial injustice today by reading work by Michele Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
ENG. 3330: African-American Literature to 1900 (15424)
*DIVISION III*
TF 10:40-12:05 PM
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will examine early U. S. African-American literature, paying particular attention the international aspects of black writing, a discursive and geographical domain currently known as “The Black Atlantic.” Stretching from African epic to Chesnutt’s “Conjure Woman” stories, we will think about the uses of folklore and myth, and the role of literature’s contribution to personal or national consciousness (in both African, and U.S. contexts). For example, does the Malinese epic, The Sundiata, help us understand the social identity that early African American artists had? We will also consider the consequences of joint authorship, when a text is an explicit collaboration between two or more people, or when elements of a text have been borrowed or plagiarized from other sources. What do we do with the evidence, argued recently by Vincent Carretta, that the author of a famous eighteenth-century slave narrative, Olaudah Equiano, may have actually been born in South Carolina and “made up” his African memories? Or Lydia Maria Child’s sentimental editing of Linda Brent’s Narrative? In what way is the slave narrative, often taken to be the ur-moment of African-American writing, engaged with other Afro- or Euro-literary traditions? How does gender shape early African-American literature? How do we study folklore as literature?
ENG. 3340: American Realism & Naturalism (15165)
*DIVISION III*
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will examine the Realist and Naturalist movements of the late nineteenth century. Historically, this period witnesses the co-optation of Victorian ideals of religion and family by economic and scientific narratives. The rhetoric of “survival of the fittest,” as Herbert Spencer put it, began to rule civic discourse. Happy endings?—not so much. The course will begin with Emile Zola, generally regarded as the father of Naturalism, and we will read from his L’Assommoir, a lurid account of a washerwoman and her roofer husband who descend into alcoholism. We will pursue this trajectory with American texts such as Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Stephen Crane’s Maggie: Girl of the Streets, and “The Monster,” Frank Norris’s McTeague, and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Class discussions may include why McTeague likes to bite his girlfriend’s fingertips; the consequences of someone having his face burned away; and what to do when your husband asks you to stay calm and then ties you to a bed for several months. Students would benefit from a basic familiarity with the 18th or 19th century European novel as preparation for this class.
ENG. 3475: African American Women’s Rhetorics (15159)
*DIVISION IV*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. LaToya Sawyer
What does rapper Cardi B’s “bloody shoes” and “money moves” have in common with Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ viral reclamation of her time? What can this answer help us understand about Black women’s rhetorical traditions and resources and their value today? African American Women’s Rhetorics will explore these questions and more.
This course expands and goes beyond ethos, logos, pathos and other common understandings of rhetorical theory derived from Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions in order to explore African American women take up the productive arts of persuasion. The course will consider the intersections of race, gender, and other social categories in order to understand the specificity of rhetorical production of women of African descent in the U.S. We will examine how Black women use discourses, language, and literacies such as the use of ratchet language, hair styling and hand-clap games, and digital literacy practices in order to be, advance, protect, and celebrate themselves and the people and concerns they care about. Students will consider the social, political, economic, and educational implications of African American women’s rhetorics and have the opportunity to showcase their findings for the larger university community. Readings will include: Talking Back: Thinking Black, Thinking Feminist by bell hooks, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere by Gwendolyn Pough, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop by Kyra Gaunt, and other selected traditional and digital texts.
ENG. 3480: The Harlem Renaissance (15378)
*DIVISION IV*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. John Lowney
This course is an introduction to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance (or New Negro Renaissance) was a remarkably prolific period of African American literature, music, art, and scholarship that followed World War I and lasted into the 1930s. In this course we will examine the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural movement in relation to both African American history and international modernism. The primary emphasis of the course is on intensive study of important African American writers, with attention to parallel developments in music and the visual arts. Readings include W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Toni Morrison, Jazz; and selected poetry by McKay, Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson.
ENG. 3560: American Ethnic Literatures (15158)
*DIVISION IV*
Special topics: Asian American Literature & Theory
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course introduces a vibrant and diverse literary and theoretical tradition by Americans of Asian descent. Asians have been in the United States since the late 1700s, but a fully coherent literature and field of study did not coalesce until the mid-1970s and until very recently, treated as a form of ethnography rather than literature. In the last decade, a “new formalism” though has arisen in Asian American and ethnic studies. We will start with the key early texts that founded the field—among them Okada’s No-No Boy, Kingston’s Woman Warrior—and make our way to more recent examples of multi-genre Asian American fiction. Newly published examples under consideration: Nguyen, The Sympathizer, Liu’s collection of sci-fic short stories, The Paper Menagerie and/or Asian American graphic novels. Alongside the literature, we will read some of the major Asian American cultural theorists—Lisa Lowe, Kandice Chuh, Susan Koshy, among them. A few of the central questions animating this class: what does it mean to designate some literature as “Asian American”? Does the category “Asian American” do any specific epistemological work? What does Asian American literature tell us about the relationship between race and literary form?
ENG. 3580: Postcolonial Literature (15156)
*DIVISION IV*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
This class will provide an introduction to a category of literature that could be called Postcolonial, Anglophone, Third World, or Commonwealth: in other words, English-language literature from the formerly colonized nations of Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Reading widely in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama, we will consider each text as a product of its historical circumstances, while also paying close attention to literary style. How do our writers deploy voice, symbolism, structure, and plot in order to recognize and move past the legacy of colonialism?
ENG /CLS 3610: Classical Drama in Translation (15173/15283)
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Robert Forman
The course focuses on those plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that most closely mimetically reflect the social and political events of fifth-century Athens—and, surprisingly enough, the social and political events of contemporary America. These include the consequences of protracted war and weak leadership, religious extremism, and class and ethnic conflict. Readings will include the Trojan War plays of all three playwrights, the Theban Civil War plays of Sophocles and Euripides, and the Medea, Heracles, and Dionysus plays of Euripides.
ENG. 3690: Special Topics in Literature and Culture (15155)
(Required Study Abroad Component)
*DIVISION IV*
Culture, Race, and Baseball
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Raj Chetty
This course will introduce students to the influential and interdisciplinary field of cultural studies by engaging some of the key critical writings on the concept of “culture” and situating these critical ideas in relation to a very specific topic: baseball. The course presumes no interest in baseball or sport per se, but instead aims to look at baseball as a cultural site, an important space where cultural issues like race and class are articulated and contested. The course will include a week-long trip to the Dominican Republic during the university’s Spring Break (February 17-23). By October 13, students must apply through the Office of Global Studies to participate in the study abroad component, and the study abroad component is a required part of the course.
One purpose for cultural studies is to engage with spaces that are typically seen as not sufficiently intellectual or academic, not “cultivated” or “cultured” enough to warrant serious reflection or study. Cultural studies as a discipline in the US and the UK emerged in the 1950s and 60s as a method to consider the political, economic, and social implications of culture at large, and since then has branched into different approaches that can all loosely fit under “cultural studies.” This class will engage different models of cultural studies, putting these models to use in studying cultural materials ranging from novella to theater to film and visual culture. The unifying theme across these different cultural materials is the relationship between baseball and race.
ENG. 3700: The Teaching of Writing (15168)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Anne Geller
Although we usually think of the teaching – and learning – of writing as something that happens within school, there are multiple contexts in which writing is used, practiced, learned and taught. In this course we will spend the semester considering these many contexts for writing and the ways writing might be supported across our lifespans. We will pay particular attention to how writing and literacy are sponsored (and self-sponsored) within organizations (religious, cultural, social, athletic, and/or activist) and spaces (homes, workplaces, libraries, hospitals, digital/online) and in families/households and communities.
By exploring these non-classroom contexts, and the people who learn, teach and mentor writing within them, we will question our conceptions of what it means to be a writer and a teacher of writing: What do we authorize as the teaching of writing and whom do we authorize to teach it and why? What aspects of writing and literacy and histories of writing and language are valued and performed in these varied contexts and why? What written or composed genres? What are the opportunities writers have to further develop their agency and identity in these varied contexts? How do the writing practices and processes of these other contexts differ from those experiences in school contexts and how might these differences inform how we critique the way writing is dominantly taught in institutionalized schooling?
ENG. 3710: Introduction To Creative Writing (15164)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
- 5:00 – 7:50 PM
Prof. Tom Philipose
This introductory creative writing workshop will focus on your writing and your thoughts (that means you will be writing a lot). We will explore the creative aspects of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, poetic-prose, and (screen)playwriting. We will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of what your writing voice/style can be. You will be expected to attend public readings and performances (off campus and on your own time), and you will be urged to submit some of your work for possible publication in the SJU Literary Journal, Sequoya.
We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques of others (outside of this workshop) to help us become careful readers and diligent writers. An experimental and non-traditional approach will be encouraged to help elicit fresh, unique work that reflects the individual writers in our workshop. The majority of our classwork will entail reading and discussing your writing (you will read and write in—and outside of—every class every week). You will receive feedback in class and via one-to-one meetings (outside of the workshop) that we will arrange to fit your schedule.
ENG. 3730: Poetry Workshop (15163)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
W 10:40 – 1:30 PM
Prof. Simona Blat
Poetry is a way of living in the world, wrote Lucille Clifton. This course will examine how and why that is. Students interested in studying and practicing the craft of poetry will explore its tools and traditions in order to generate their own poems. We’ll cover key poetic terms and devices by studying traditional and contemporary poets, yet the majority of the course will be devoted to discussing your own work. These discussions will focus on craft, with emphasis on various aspects of composition: the poetic line, the image, sound, structure, tone, and speaker. Through writing prompts, you will experiment with different poetic forms and generate original work that will undergo revision. Readings will include poetry, essays on poetry, and poetic manifestos. We will continually discuss the issues that confront the poet, and strategies, both formal and imaginative, for dealing with these issues within the poem. You will be required to submit brief critical analyses of poems, attentively critique each other’s original work, and research the life and work of a contemporary poet. Over the course of the semester, students will have developed a practice of poetry and a substantial portfolio of original work.
ENG. 3880: English Studies In The Digital Age (15151)
140 Characters (or less)?
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course investigates how the digital age has transformed the mediums we use to express ourselves, the communities and audiences with which we engage, and how web writing is produced, read, shared, and circulated. We will analyze and experiment with social media platforms like blogs, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitter, and we will explore theories about how we read, remix, and mash-up in digital spaces. The course will also analyze the impact of social media on identity, relationships, activism, politics, and art. Throughout the course, students will cultivate their social media skills: understanding the landscape, learning “best practices,” and using different social media technologies to create and propagate content. The course does not require any technological experience, just a willingness to experiment and to think deeply about how we make meaning and communicate in digital spaces. For questions email Dr. Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.
ENG. 3890: The Topics in Film Genre (15167)
The Politics of Film Noir
DIVISION IV
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Scott Combs
This course looks at the emergence of “film noir” in the 1940s as an aesthetically marked crime film with paranoid and political overtones. We will trace the noir style as it resurfaces later, first in the 1970s “neo-noir” of Polanski and Altman, then in the more recent nostalgic invocations of classic cinema. Our focus in this look at the genre will be on its conspiratorial form. To that end, we will read from paranoid literature and think carefully about the political and racial “work” the movies are doing.
ENG. 3900/RCT. 3160: Modern Rhetorical Theory (15267/15266)
*Department of Communication, Rhetoric, and Theater*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Stephen Llano
Modern rhetorical theory, as a phrase, is riddled with assumptions of meaning. For something to be a theory, rhetorical, and modern at the same time is to commit to agreement with three identifying categories which beg their own questions (is it possible to have theory? Is it possible to be modern? Is rhetoric identifiable outside the contexts of its deployment?) This course takes its own title as a starting point of investigation to see what has counted and what has been left out when intellectuals began the unenviable task of accounting for the atrocities of World War Two. The class picks up just before the war to present a critical survey of rhetorical theory and travels forward through time to see what counts as modern rhetorical theory to thinkers and practitioners. Theorists of note include Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Richard Weaver, Chaim Perelman, Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca, Richard McKeon, Stephen Toulmin, and many others. Students will be asked to articulate, criticize and defend ideas from these theorists as well as encouraged to explode the canon with other rhetorical thinkers cross culturally. Students may write a traditional paper on a theory, compare theories critically, or engage in other projects to demonstrate their mastery of the course material.
ENG. 4991: Seminar in British Literature (15284)
“Place, Space, Region: the 19th C. British & Contemporary Global Anglophone Novel”
SENIOR SEMINAR
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Amy King
How does an author or novel belong to a region or place? Place, space, region, and locality: how do certain novels represent a specific place—whether that is a region, space, or locality—and why is place so important to identity? How do characters understand their world as unlike any other place, and also simultaneously shaped by forces at work elsewhere in the greater world? How do the political realities of place shape the novelistic representation of person and community? In the largest sense, this seminar will ask: how does geography turn into literature? Whether we reference Thomas Hardy’s English “Wessex” or Shani Mootoo’s Trinidadian imaginary, the question of what we mean when we analyze place and space in the novel will be central to this course.
We will explore these and other questions through selected texts from two robust novelistic traditions: the nineteenth-century British novel, and the contemporary Global Anglophone novel. We will read and discuss novels as stand-alone works of art, but also within a long tradition of novels written in English especially committed to the representation of place. We will primarily read novels, but also selected short-stories and some non-fiction prose. Novels will be chosen from these likely possibilities: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) or Mary Barton (1848), Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Kazuo Ishiguro Remains of the Day (1989), Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988), Anita Desai’s Voices in the City (2001). We will augment our reading with theoretical frames, including Jamaica Kincaid’s work of creative non-fiction, A Small Place (1988), Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions (2004).
ENG. 4993: Seminar in Special Authors (15418)
Junot Díaz
SENIOR SEMINAR
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
This course will revolve around Dominican-American fiction writer Junot Díaz’s complete fictional oeuvre, including his two collections of short stories, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and short stories published in The New Yorker. In addition, we will engage Díaz as a public figure, listening to and reading interviews, podcasts, public speeches. We’ll read the wide range criticism around Díaz’s work, with particular focus on studies focusing on gender, sexuality, and masculinity; race/racism and blackness/anti-black racism; Africanness, Latinindad, and Dominicanidad; and transnationalism, migration, and U.S. imperial power as it relates to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In addition to Díaz’s works, listed above, students will be expected to obtain Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imaginary (2016).
ENG. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (15146)
Taco Literacy: Writing Transnational Mexican Foodways
SENIOR SEMINAR
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
In recent years, there has been a steady increase of interest in the transnational migrations of Mexican food popularized by bloggers, television food shows, and travel journalists. In addition to the immense number of reviews, trade publications, and cookbooks, important social justice issues in regards to multilingualism, cultural appropriation, migrant labor, and the translation of indigenous cuisine for corporate consumption have also become topical. This course will examine transnational community foodways literacies from the angle of social justice, and how these foodways situate different literacies, rhetorics, and forms of cultural knowledge across borders. Readings will include Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Tacopedia by Deborah Holtz and Juan Carlos Mena, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America by Gustavo Arellano, and Tortillas: A Cultural History by Paula E. Morton. For more about the class see @tacoliteracy on Twitter and Instagram.
*WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: Internship In English (11690) 3 CREDITS
ENG. 4906: Internship In English (10968) 6 CREDITS
ENG. 4953: Independent Study (10254)