In this course, students investigate the way literature and other art forms have both represented the diversity of the United States and shaped conceptions of diversity. English 166AC provides students with an opportunity to deepen and complicate their appreciation of the way fictions make meaning, shape our understanding and experience of the world, and transform society. Topics vary from term to term and might focus on a form (e.g. "Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema"), a literary historical period (e.g. "Race and Revision in Early America"), or a concept (e.g. nationhood in "Literatures of the Asian Diaspora in America").

This class is an exploration of the aesthetics of movement. We’ll study bodies in movement, ideas borrowed, taken up, re-configured, re-presented. The course will be grounded in literary texts by such brilliant contemporary writers as Cathy Park Hong, Valeria Luiselli, and Jonathan Escoffery. But we will also pay attention to the fascinating ways in which popular music and media have both influenced and borrowed from theory and practice in the literary and academic worlds. We will learn from border-crossing artists and thinkers about how dynamic aesthetic ideas are forged from sometimes painful histories of displacement, and also from joyful collisions on dancefloors and in workshops. We will see how incisive and ironic critique can be smuggled into the most pleasurable of envelopes. Nothing stays still here, and we’ll move to reggaeton and Afrobeats even as we attend sharply to literary close reading, theoretical ideas, and historical context. Expect to workshop your writing, develop creative approaches to essays, and to abandon static ideas of what constitutes a migrant narrative. This class satisfies the Literatures in English requirement for the English major.

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Requirements class fulfills