Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

How do differences in how people talk relate to their struggles for political power? The Chicano poet Alurista scribbled a question like this one in the margins of his Spik in Glyph (1981), a collection of translingual poems opposing the injunction to “speak English!” lobbed at Latinxs, then and now. Similarly, in her mixed-genre memoir, The Woman Warrior (1976), Maxine Hong Kingston appropriated Chinese talk-stories for her own public literary voice: “I also talk story.” But why would both of these writers consider everyday talk in their (our) communities a resource for literary experimentation? How might studying their experiments help us all improve our own writing? Finally, what entitles them and us as communicators to insist that our experiences can resonate with anyone, regardless of who they are? These questions emanate from a shared tension for members of the nation's two fastest-growing demographics, Latinxs and Asian Americans. They (we) continue to be treated as nationally alienable “perpetual foreigners,” rather than as fellow citizens among citizens, largely based on expectations about what different kinds of people should do when they talk. In the minds of some Americans, the “tenor at which we might best speak,” as Chang-Rae Lee puts it, bars us from serious consideration for the presidency, the putative “voice” of the people. The writers we’ll be learning from grapple with this tension as a peculiarly literary one. At stake is a national unwillingness to hear generic Americanness in ethnically particular ways of talking. In response, the writers we'll be studying have insisted on the literariness of ordinary talk—its resonance of the particular as the general, as with a “timeless” work—as a resource for remediating political inequalities. We will be studying their texts as exemplary of what we can accomplish within the broad purview of public communication.

Book List:

Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (1995)

Rigoberto González, Crossing Vines (2003)

Ernesto Quiñonez, Bodega Dreams (2000)

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills