Mar 29, 2024  
2021 - 2022 Academic Catalog 
    
2021 - 2022 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 120-02 - Literary Analysis

4 credits (Fall)
In her poem “School Note” Audre Lorde writes, “and remember/ for the embattled/ there is no place/ that cannot be home/ nor is.” In this course we will be exploring the desire to belong and the contours of unbelonging across a range of literary and visual genres. Studying closely form, aesthetic innovation, as well as critical and theoretical approaches to fiction, poetry, film and visual art, we will address how narratives of belonging, diaspora, displacement, and dispossession take shape through a vast sensorium of affects in contemporary works. We will take a comparative intersectional approach, analyzing the stylistic and narrative conventions of each genre, and their relationship to historic and diachronic imaginaries of national identity, sociopolitical strife, cultural anxiety, intergenerational trauma, and collective memory. Readings will include works by Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi, Ocean Vuong, Kamila Shamsie, Elizabeth Acevedo, Claudia Rankine, Tommy Pico and Tina Chang, paired with visual art and films by Julie Dash, Wendy Red Star, Simone Leigh, and Maria Magdalena Campos Pons among others. 

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Nikolopoulou