ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).

Topic for 2024/25b: Borderlands of American Identity: In Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa writes that borderlands are a “place of contradictions,” a “state of transition,” a “new language,” an “open wound,” and a site where the “inner life of the Self” is “activated, awakened.” In this course, we examine American literature as a study of borderlands, and the ways writers have used these “new languages” to understand (American) identity. To do so, we examine works by Latinx, indigenous, Black, Asian, and queer writers, spanning from the historical origins of what is considered “borderlands literature” in the nineteenth century to twenty-first-century works that cross the generic borders of literature, like spoken word poetry and graphic novels. Our course does not just cross national borders, examining writers across the Americas, but also temporal, racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, corporeal, aesthetic, and generic borders. We emerge from this course with historical contexts for our current moment and a foundation to the aesthetic and political engagements with these phenomena from writers exploring identity in the borderlands. Seth Cosimini.

This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS