English R1B

Book List

Cisneros, Sandra: The House on Mango Street; Cole, Teju: Open City; Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!; García, Cristina: Dreaming in Cuban

Description

Place is experienced in a variety of ways: as a material force we encounter daily, as an active and constitutive relationship, as a haunting and inescapable memory or feeling. This course will consider the narrative and affective strategies used to represent place, paying particular attention to how displaced characters situate themselves within narrative. To this end, the course will not only hit upon the necessary questions of identity and belonging, but ask, ultimately, what kind of place narrative is for the exile, the immigrant, and the nostalgic. Topics that will emerge when situating narrative include the uplifting and debilitating experience of nostalgia, the omnipresence of the city and education, and the often-uncontrollable power of memory. This course will look to interrogate a selected set of literature closely alongside important scholarship in order to connect these affective and cultural subjects to student research. This course will emphasize research skills and the construction of complex arguments in composition.