Course Description

In this class, we will explore a swath of classic and unconventional American literature and culture from 1865 to the present focusing on protest, civil rights, and social change. We will interpret texts by close reading formal literary strategies related to the narrative plot, character formation, imagery, rhetoric, and tone. We will also analyze material attending to the expression meaning of freedom and citizenship, labor and class, government regulations, afterlives of slavery, settler colonialism, and LGBTQ rights. These topics pose a series of intriguing questions in this course:  How does the individual protagonist tell a larger story of America and society? How might collaborative writing substantiate and detail our conception of democracy? To what extent are the aesthetics (or artistry) of literature shaped or determined by a protest? What’s the difference between art and protest? And above all else, when there is tension, conflict, cultural shifts reactionary responses, revolution, and resolutions achieved and unrealized America, what can literature do? 

 

Select Images associated with Authors and texts in this course:
Image of James Baldwin seated in from of bookshelf. He rests his chin in one hand and looks to the right. Black and white photo.
James Baldwin (1984-1987) is the author of “The Fire Next Time,” amongst many other texts about Black life, racism, and American society.
Drawn Poster black and white. A Brick wall separating black students from a building that reads "CCNY". Just visible over the top of the wall is a cop with a helmet that says "NYPD." He grips the hand of a black student with one hand and a baton in the other. The student being held by the cop is just out of view on the other side of the wall suggesting that he climbed over the wall and was punished by the cop
Unknown, “CCNY Protest Flier,” CUNY Digital History Archive, accessed September 28, 2021, https://cdha.cuny.edu/items/show/6962.

 

 

 

A Japanese man with his head down and face covered by his two fists drawn in black. Two red barbed wires crossing in an "X" over the man.
First edition cover of “No-No Boy” (1957) by John Okada. “No-No Boy” is a historical fiction set in 1947 that follows a Japanese American young man returning home to Seattle after two years in a Japanese internment camp and two years in federal prison for refusing to fight in WWII.

 

Split image. On Left side, cover of "An American Sunrise." The title is written in yellow on a dark blue sky at he top. On the bottom to the left there is a group of native people standing together as the sun rises. To the right is an photo of Joy Hard Holding a saxophone, standing under a tree and smiling.
Book cover for “American Sunrise” and photo of the author Joy Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate.
Side profile photo of W.E.B. Du Bois. He is wearing a suit and looks down in pensive thought.
Cover of The Souls of Black Folk” (1903) with a photo portrait of the author, W.E.B. Du Bois, sociologist, race leader, and prolific author whose work focuses on the uplift of the black race following Emancipation and Reconstruction through the 20th century.