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ENGL 265-02, Special Topics: What is Ethnic Literature?, Fall 2014
Dykema, Amanda
Dykema, Amanda
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English, Department of, Syllabus, Curriculum, 2014 Fall, Student research
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Abstract
This course will study the emergence of the category of “ethnic literature” in the United States—a vital,
shifting, contested, incomplete, political, artistic site from which conceptions of literary expression are
expanded and interrogated. To ask “What is ethnic literature?” presumes other questions: what is
literature? What do we mean by the term “ethnic”? In this class, we will do our best to be mindful of these
questions, analyzing these works for how they represent the cultures about which and within which they
were written but also being careful not to assume that these works tell the entire story about a culture or
ethnic experience in the United States.
Ultimately, this course will not attempt to cover the history of ethnic literature in the United States – this
would be impossible in fifteen weeks. Instead, we will begin with the rise of ethnic literature as an object
of study in the U.S. academy. Tracing the canon debates of the 1980s and 1990s and the creation of ethnic
literature anthologies, we will examine the political and cultural contexts out of which Latino/a, Asian
American, African American, and Native American texts were incorporated into the study of American
Literature. We will analyze several exemplary early ethnic literary works, including Gloria Anzaldúa’s
Borderlands/La Frontera and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, to consider the formal and
political qualities that made them so attractive for ethnic literary study. We will investigate why literary
canons matter—how they index not only questions of taste and value, but of power—and consider the
stakes of including or excluding a given text from a canon. Finally, we will read 21st century works like
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,
considering how contemporary writers formally and politically negotiate the canons of American
literature and ethnic literature in light of the legacies of the 20th century.
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This syllabus was submitted to the Office of Academic by the course instructor. Uploaded by Lorie Yearwood.