9:05a-9:55a MWF (50) 3 cr

TOPIC: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTIONS: WRITING, RACE AND NATION

This course will explore the vexed and intricate relationships between racial, ethnic and national identities as they are represented in 20th century literature from the United States. One of the central questions we will grapple with is how literary representations do not merely reflect these identities, but are actively involved in the complex process of inventing them. Can one consider terms like "race," "ethnicity," and "nation" to be fictions in their own right? What impact do these "imagined communities" have on the ways in which we live our daily lives? How do questions of class, gender and sexuality complicate our understanding of belonging?

We will explore these and other issues through texts by James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Paule Marshall, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Morrison.