Recent Courses in LSJE
These are courses offered in Literature, Social Justice, and Environment since fall 2006:Gender, Race, and Nature in American Environmental Literature
Sara Spurgeon
This course will help students think critically about the ways “nature” and concepts of the natural are reflected, constructed, and deployed in American literature and culture, and how ideas about the natural differ historically and across ethnicities, gender and class boundaries. We will read some “classics” of nature writing as it has been traditionally defined, as well as novels, journals, poetry, and critical texts that challenge commonly held notions about this genre. Some questions that will guide our inquiries: How is the idea of the “natural” used to construct categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality? What are the origins for various American myths about nature, and what might the consequences be for the environment? How have notions about frontiers and empire impacted the way contemporary cultures view nature? Where, in fact, does nature begin and where does it end?
Place, Space, and Mestizaje in Chicana/o Cultural Production
Priscilla Ybarra
From the lost land grants of the nineteenth century to the imaginary homeland of Aztlán and the endless fields of migrant farmworker horizons, place and space play key roles in Chicana/o cultural production. Much of Chicana/o literature elaborates the feel of a particular space and the deep history of a specific place, or environment. Yet, Chicana/o literature is also deeply invested in a culture of mestizaje and draws critical strength from this hybrid background, especially as it allows for an ever-shifting identity. How does Chicana/o cultural production and critical theory reconcile the “root-edness” of space and place with the mixture and movement that defines mestizaje? This course will explore the relationship among place, space, and mestizaje by reviewing some of the foundational texts in Chicana/o literary studies as well as some of the most recent studies on place and mestizaje. Primary readings will include recently recovered texts from the nineteenth century by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Jovita González, as well as more contemporary works by John Rechy, Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Helena María Viramontes. Secondary works include The Chicano Studies Reader, which selects from the first 30 years of landmark articles in the journal Aztlán, Rafael Pérez-Torres’ Mestizaje, Ramon Saldívar’s The Borderlands of Culture, and Mary Pat Brady’s Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies.
“Soul/Post-Soul”: African American Literature, Popular Culture and Civil Rights, 1960-2000
Michael Borshuk
Writing of connections between African American literature and grassroots civil rights activity in 1968, the black intellectual Hoyt Fuller announced: “The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.” Indeed, the 1960s and 70s are commonly remembered as a period in which African American progressive politics, literary expression, and popular culture complemented each other in an organic network of collective action and racial pride. However, as cultural critic and journalist Nelson George has argued, by the late 1970s, African American culture—at least in its various popular manifestations—had entered a “post-soul” period, in which the assertive Afrocentrism of the civil rights era had diminished or vanished from view. This course will compare two generations of African American writers and artists to consider the soul/post-soul shift that George and Neal map. We will consider aesthetic differences between these two periods, with special attention to the relationship between African American art and politics in the final decades of the twentieth century. As well, we will consider the commodification of “soul” and blackness in popular culture between the 1960s and the present, attentive to how this commodification complicates the idealized vision of black cultural revolution described by figures like Hoyt Fuller. While this is primarily a course in African American literature and intellectual trends, we will also look in detail at various popular culture phenomena, including the blaxploitation film genre, the birth and rise of hip-hop culture, and changes in African American television programming between the 1970s and the 1980s.
Multicultural American Cinema
Scott Baugh
“Multicultural American Cinema” offers an introduction to critical media studies for graduate students. However, the seminar also fosters investigations into the extent to which the aesthetics of film represent and express American multiculturalism. With special attention to the dynamics of “mainstream” and independent/alternative fictive-narrative feature films, the course covers a diverse range of issues involved in the formulation of American multiculturalism in cinema, including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class and socio-political status. Students, then, not only practice analytical reading skills through film interpretation, but also explore and identify significant aspects of our American culture. Films for the semester include: Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (Griffith); El Norte, Mi Familia/My Family, and Selena (Nava); High Noon (Zinneman); Shanghai Noon (Dey); Windtalkers (Woo); Rush Hour (Ratner); Manhattan (Allen); Heartland (Pearce); Across the Moon (Gottlieb); Old Gringo (Puenzo); New York, New York (Scorsese); Boyz-N-the-Hood and Shaft (Singleton); Shaft (Parks); Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X (Lee); Powwow Highway (Wacks); Mi Vida Loca/My Crazy Life (Anders); Glory (Zwick); Mississippi Masala (Nair); El Mariachi and Desperado (Rodriguez); The Godfather trilogy (Coppola); Blade Runner (Scott); Philadelphia (Demme); Amores Perros and 21 Grams (González-Iñárritu ); Y Tú Mamá También and Children of Men (Cuarón). Textbooks for the course include: Ella Shohat and Bob Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994/2001) and Margo Kasdan, Christine Saxton, and Susan Tavernetti’s The Critical Eye (3rd ed., Kendall-Hunt, 2002). Supplemental readings on reserve include articles by Stam & Spence, Mulvey, Silverman, Mellencamp, Fregoso, among others. Course requirements will include assigned readings and screenings; one short (approx. 5 pp.) critical essay; one class presentation; a (“green-light”) term project; and one article-length research essay.
Gender, Race, Class and the Victorian Novel
Ann Daghistany Ransdell
English 5352, "Studies in Fiction," is a comparative literature course that may be arranged in various ways. This fall the students will read the English Victorian Novel, in order to compare the treatment of issues dealing with race, gender, and class. Students will understand in greater depth the origin of American social attitudes in the Victorian period. History and criticism of the period will be utilized. Specific attention will be paid to the Victorian concepts of education, and institutions such as the boarding school and the workhouse will be compared as microcosms of social policy. The impact of gender and class attitudes upon learning will be highlighted. Contemporary films of three novels that we read will be shown in the class to provide a novel/film comparison of character and theme. There will be three short papers, a long paper, an oral presentation of that long paper, and a final. We will read the following texts: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist;Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Charlotte Brontë, The Professor; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; and George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.
Endangered Languages
Colleen Fitzgerald
The issues of language endangerment bear on many concerns of the contemporary world, such as globalization, technology, and biodiversity. Globalization has become a buzzword, and the presence of major world languages like English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic has threatened the survival of many minority languages. Recent efforts in the documentation of endangered languages has focused on the use of technology in archiving, preserving, and accessing linguistic materials, but individual communities may object to some of these technological goals or lack resources like electricity, broadband access, and computers for technology to be a reality. Linguistic diversity has been argued to provide benefits that parallel diversity in the plant and animal domains, as cultural, medical and other knowledge may be lost as language death occurs.
Studying endangered languages involves three key elements: the structural features of languages (phonology, syntax, morphology); the social context of language use; and the often-conflicting ideologies that communities have about dominant and minority languages. We will study these elements in case studies of different communities, drawing on the instructor's own research with the Tohono O'odham Nation of Arizona and elsewhere in the southwest. We may also have special guests in our seminar, researchers from other universities who visit to share their work on endangered languages.
Language and Gender
Mary Jane Hurst
Our main goals in English 5337 will be to learn at a graduate level some basics of language study, to explore the relationship between gender and language, to examine competing theories about language and gender, and, overall, to understand the context of gender studies from the perspective of linguistics. Aside from some introductory background lectures, the first three-fourths or so of the semester will be arranged around discussions of specified readings. The last part of the semester will be devoted to student presentations applying course concepts in the analysis of specific texts. For details about how this class has been taught in a previous semester, visit the course information section of Dr. Hurst’s website (www.faculty.english.ttu.edu/hurst). This course would be appropriate for students in any subfield or combination of subfields in English (linguistics, literature, technical communication, rhetoric, film, creative writing, etc.) as well students with interests in language and/or gender from programs outside English (CMLL, Psychology, Anthropology, Education, HDFS, etc.). The books for Fall 2007’s English 5337 have not been selected as of 1/19/07.