English R1B

Book List

Cruz, Nilo: Anna in the Tropics; Fraxedes, J. Joaquin: The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera; Garcia, Cristina: Dreaming in Cuban; Hemingway, Ernest: The Old Man and the Sea; Hijuelos, Oscar: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Other Readings and Media

The class will watch selected episodes of I Love Lucy.

Secondary critical texts provided by instructor.

Description

The history of Cubans living in the US is a complicated one, caught between the US’s imperialist wars of the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries and the Cold War machinations of the first and second worlds. This course will consider the cultural representation of Cubans and Cuba within the US, and, in particular, look to the Cuban-American novel as repository of the divergent and conflicting historical narratives that have produced and been produced by Cuban-Americans. In this way, the generational struggles of Cuban-Americans (and, in particular, the lasting image of the émigré in Cuban-American culture) will be related as a focal point, through which drastically different senses of Cubanidad have come to be represented. This course will look to interrogate a selected set of literature closely alongside Cuban-American scholarship in order to generate specific underlying problematics, questions, and relationships that can be used for student research. This course will emphasize research skills and the construction of complex arguments in composition.