Time Schedule:
Linda S Watts
BIS 351
Bothell Campus
Explores a particular topic in American culture that highlights the methodological tools needed to integrate the interpretation of cultural texts, including literature, film, music, and art, with their historical contexts.
Class description
American Modernism(s) Winter 2004
In light of recent scholarship on canon formation and modernism, this course will offer students an opportunity not only to read some of the 'classic' texts of modernism, but also a chance to consider how the definition(s) of modernism have tended to emphasize some writers, topics, and approaches, while systematically excluding others. Along with critical essays, our literary readings will likely feature: James Agee, Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Paul Laurence Dunbar, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Ezra Pound, Meridel LeSueur, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Anzia Yezierska, and anonymous Chinese immigrant poets. One of the goals for this course is to explore the interdisciplinary links and cross-influences across modernist expressive forms (fine, utilitarian, decorative, and language arts). For that reason, our writing assignments for this course will call for examination of the relationship between literary texts and other forms of cultural evidence. Where do these materials meet? diverge? How might we read one form of evidence through another? What insights become possible?
Remembering Nat Turner: Studies in Historical Memory Autumn 2003
While it has been 172 years since Nat Turner entered the historical stage as the leader of a slave uprising in the Antebellum south, his memory still shapes the way many individuals understand their own place as historical actors and agents of change. For example, in his autobiography, Malcolm X had this to say about Nat Turner:
I read about the slave preacher Nat Turner, who put the fear of God into the white slavemaster. Nat Turner wasn't going around preaching pie-in-the-sky and "non-violent" freedom for the black man. There in Virginia one night in 1831, Nat and seven other slaves started out at his master's home and though the night they went from one plantation "big house" to the next, killing, until by the next morning 57 white people were dead and Nat had about 70 slaves following him. White people, terrified for their lives, fled from their homes, locked themselves up in public buildings, hid in the woods, and some even left the state. A small army of soldiers took two months to catch and hang Nat Turner. Somewhere I have read where Nat Turner's example is said to have inspired John Brown to invade Virginia and attack Harper's Ferry nearly thirty years late, with thirteen white men and five Negroes.
This course will focus on both contemporary accounts of the 1831 Southampton County, Virginia slave insurrection and subsequent representations of those events/figures in media such as non-fiction, fiction, drama, and film. Our central goals will be two: (1) to investigate the historical situation of the rebellion, and (2) to analyze the event’s implications for various publics as its memory/retelling resonates in historical imagination through the works of later playwrights, documentarians, novelists, activists, artists, and historians. This is an inquiry course, in which class members will engage with both primary sources (such as newspapers, trial records, tax records, census information, material culture) and secondary materials (historical essays, cultural studies, and literary/artistic treatments).
Potential readings include:
Criticism, literature, history, primary sources and data
American Modernism(s) Winter 2004
In light of recent scholarship on canon formation and modernism, this course will offer students an opportunity not only to read some of the 'classic' texts of modernism, but also a chance to consider how the definition(s) of modernism have tended to emphasize some writers, topics, and approaches, while systematically excluding others. Along with critical essays, our literary readings will likely feature: James Agee, Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Paul Laurence Dunbar, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Ezra Pound, Meridel LeSueur, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Anzia Yezierska, and anonymous Chinese immigrant poets. One of the goals for this course is to explore the interdisciplinary links and cross-influences across modernist expressive forms (fine, utilitarian, decorative, and language arts). For that reason, our writing assignments for this course will call for examination of the relationship between literary texts and other forms of cultural evidence. Where do these materials meet? diverge? How might we read one form of evidence through another? What insights become possible?
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
The course will combine full- and small-group discussions with hands-on activities.
Recommended preparation
No prior coursework serves as prerequisite, although it is necessary to have some energy for exploring literary history through critical inquiry and original research. Further, three attributes in each participant within this shared inquiry are absolutely crucial to our--and your--success: (1) seriousness of purpose, (2) passion for dialogue, and (3) commitment to be both reflective and consultative in academic practice.
Class assignments and grading
Evaluation of student performance typically includes participation, presentations, exams, in-class writings, and projects.
