AMST 300
Tell Even Us: Writing Memory, Trauma, Self Fall 2018
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed COMP 357 / ENGL 300
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

In this course, we will read a diverse selection of personal memoirs dealing with the traumas, transgressions, and transformations of what we understand to be “modern life.” We will meditate on how categories of identity and experience, memory and history are being constructed and deconstructed, reimagined and remade anew. We will pay special attention to how these writers/artists narrate the overlapping cycles of loss, pain, grief, survival, resilience, and resistance in the face of (structural, institutional, interpersonal, and intimate) violence, and consider the possibilities for (individual and collective) healing that can exist in and beyond the world as we know it. What, after all, does it even mean to have or to not have, to find, to lose, to have stolen, to dissolve, and/or to recover a self in a besieged America? Books we will cover may include: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Gloria AnzaldĂșa), Dictee (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Alexander Chee), When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele), Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Deborah Miranda), This is for the mostless (Jason Magabo Perez), Redefining Realness (Janet Mock), like a solid to a shadow (Janice Lobo Sapigao), Men We Reaped(Jesmyn Ward), 7 Miles A Second (David Wojnarowicz).
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 15
Expected: 15
Class#: 1032
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly reading responses, a midterm paper (7-8 pages), and a manuscript for a memoir in a medium of their own choosing
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: previous coursework in race, ethnicity, and diaspora, junior or senior standing, or permission of instructor
Enrollment Preferences: American Studies majors
Distributions: Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Notes: meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under AMST; meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under ENGL or COMP DPE: Analyzes the dynamics of power and privilege in the U.S. from a national and transnational context, examines the perspectives of socially marginalized groups, and fosters an understanding of the beliefs, experiences, and cultural productions of these groups.
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
AMST 300 Division II COMP 357 Division I ENGL 300 Division I
Attributes: AMST Arts in Context Electives

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