This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

A passing narrative is an account—fiction or nonfiction—of a person (or group) claiming a racial or ethnic identity that she does not (or they do not) “possess.” Such narratives speak—directly, indirectly, and very uneasily—to the authenticity, the ambiguity, and the performance of personal identity; they also speak to issues of official and traditional categorization. The passing narrative—the narrative that accounts for making the “different” claim—necessarily unsettles notions of belonging and ownership and underscores that race can be viewed as a construction or a series of conventions. The course will investigate the public nature of race by examining narratives—published and unpublished stories, novels, memoirs, and films—that call the absoluteness of its boundaries into question. We’ll look at materials that address racial imitation—minstrelsy, “yellow-face,” monstrosity, etc. All said, we’ll be looking rather closely at books and movies that reveal, document, question, and celebrate ambiguous spaces in an imposing structure, one often assumed to be “natural.” We’ll likely read Adrienne Rich’s “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Gene Yang’s American-Born Chinese, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, essays by Gloria Anzaldua, Noel Ignatiev, Henry Louis Gates, etc. We’ll watch Orson Welles’s 1958 film noir Touch of Evil and (probably) Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 film Alien: Resurrection. Short “position” papers, longer papers, discussions led by class members, quizzes on the reading. This class satisfies the Literatures in English requirement for the English major.

Book List:

James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Gene Yang’s American-Born Chinese, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, others TBA. Plus selected essays (PDFs) and films.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills