ENGL 239
Imagining Immigrants Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The goal of this course is two-fold: to become more responsive readers of literature and more empathetic readers of cultural differences. As Shakespeare’s Othello demonstrates, the conflicts, anxieties, and vulnerabilities faced by today’s immigrants have a long history. Moving physically from one culture to another but remaining imaginatively torn between their adopted country and their country of origin, feeling at times like a stranger to both, immigrants face questions that concern us all in our increasingly global society, questions of identity, liminality, alienation, empathy, and language. Bombarded by a language that is not their own, immigrants are constantly thinking about what words mean both literally and symbolically. Why this word rather than another? How do humor and irony work in a foreign culture? How do writers reconcile the pressures of the present moment with the stream of memories from the old country? How is one person’s point of view, or one society’s point of view, different from another’s? How can images and metaphors convey the experience of constantly seeing an object, or an entire world, in terms of another? In addition to Shakespeare’s Othello, Nicole Krauss’s History of Love, Li-Young Lee’s Rose, Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, and Stephen Frear’s film Dirty Pretty Things, we will read personal essays and short stories by such writers as Eva Hoffman, Oscar Hijuelos, Ha Jin, Nola Kambanda, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Frank McCourt, Edward Said, and Helena Maria Viramontes.
The Class: Format: seminar/discussion
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3705
Grading: OPG
Requirements/Evaluation: active contributions to class discussion; four 3- to 5-page papers plus short journal entries for a total of 20 pages
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have taken a prior English course or who have a 5 on the AP exam; sophomores and English majors who have yet to take a Gateway
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
Attributes: AMST Arts in Context Electives
AMST Comp Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora
ASAM Related Courses
ENGL 200-level Gateway Courses
ENGL Literary Histories C

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