Course Description and Objectives

Description:

This course will introduce students to key African, Indian, Caribbean, Central American, and South American oral and written narratives from about 3000 BCE to the present day. While paying special attention to historical specificity, we will consider the ways in which literatures from various sites around the world suggest varied and dynamic relationships among power, violence, gender, race, ethnicity, and identity formation before, during, and since the imperial incursion. In this context, we will consider the specific material conditions necessary to precipitate organized resistance, as well as the various forms resistance may take. The resulting key questions we will keep before us are: in what ways have power and violence shaped contemporary notions of “the world”? What are some potential responses to past injustices? In what ways can we envision ourselves as productive citizens of our world community? Readings and films are from or depict Algeria, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Haiti, India, Kenya, Malaysia (formerly British Malaya), Martinique, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, The United States, and Tanzania.


Objectives:

This course is part of the Cluster Two, Arts and Humanities, General Education requirement. After completing this course, students should be able to perform the following tasks outlined in the General Education guidelines:

1. Generate increasingly nuanced questions (interpretations, ideas) about literature and explain why those questions matter.

2. Use appropriate vocabulary and tactics to analyze specific literary expressions of culture and the relationship between the reader, the author, and text.

3. Define ways that texts serve as arguments and identify rhetorical and formal elements that inform these arguments.

4. Recognize appropriate contexts (such as genres, political perspectives, textual juxtapositions) and understand that readers may interpret literature from a variety of perspectives.

5. Articulate a variety of examples of the ways in which literature gives us access to the human experience that reveals what differentiates it from, and connects it to, the other disciplines that make up the arc of human learning.