ENGL 239
Imagining Immigrants Spring 2017
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The goal of this writing-intensive gateway course is to advance our abilities as rigorous, subtle, and imaginative interpreters of literature and to become sensitive readers of the conflicts, anxieties, and vulnerabilities faced by today’s immigrants. 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?
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3258
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active participation in discussion, four 5-page papers and journal entries
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: sophomores and first-year students who have not yet taken an ENGL Gateway course
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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