English R1A

Book List

Anzaldúa, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ; Cuadros, Gil: City Of God; Islas, Arturo: The Rain God

Other Readings and Media

Additional texts will be available through Perusall and, potentially, through an optional course reader. We will also view some films (available through reserves for our course or through widely available websites), both in class or on our own, that will shape our discussions and approaches to our topics.

Description

In this Rhetoric and Composition course, we will explore what it means to “enunciate” ethnic and queer positionality in LGBT and Latinx/Chicanx works. We will explore course materials with an eye to the “slipperiness” of clear enunciation and identity practices. Doing so will allow us to think, talk, and write about historical and contemporary notions of queer and ethnic belonging, separation, invisibility, and vibrancy. We may be encouraged to think about the costs of prescriptive group identification, consequences for not “enunciating” identifications clearly or in line with group articulation, and alternatives to the desire for enunciation itself. Desire will be a keyword. "Desire" for enunciation, belonging, and autonomy will shape much of our thinking in this class as we consult a range of Tejana/o/x, California/o/x, and other U.S. Latinx artistic productions.

This is a Rhetoric and Composition class. In it, we will work to develop effective reading, note-taking, and writing strategies for college writing. We will work on developing our analytical skills through close reading of non-fiction, fiction, and theory/philosophy. This is a writing-intensive course. Students will be asked to practice basic skills required of most college essays including summary, analysis, thesis construction, and text citation. Students will also have the opportunity to write practical documents required across disciplines like proposals, précis, and memos and develop skills in collaborative work with peers through peer-to-peer text review and critique.