Course Schedule and Catalog

Department: English

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Lecture

Credit Hours: 3

Description: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN STUDIES: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY IN LATER 20TH CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE ***** What do novels and stories tell us about how identities are formed and challenged by the relation between history and individual memory? What do literary texts of the later 20th century tell us about how people come to know what they know, including how they come to know who they are? In this course we will read a number of texts written in the 1980s and 90s that represent the relations between history, memory, and the formation of a range of identities--in nation, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, among others. Throughout we will be interested in how these texts represent the self in terms of its possibilities for and/or the difficulties in revising received histories--histories that are transmitted through legal, cultural, and familial channels. ***** Also offered as WGST 462. ***** INSTRUCTOR: Lurie, Susan Repeatable for Credit.