COMP 357
Tell Even Us: Writing Memory, Trauma, Self
Last Offered Fall 2018
Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed ENGL 300 / AMST 300
This course is not offered in the current 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#: 1034
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
Prerequisites: previous coursework in race, ethnicity, and diaspora, junior or senior standing, or permission of instructor
Enrollment Preferences: American Studies majors
Distributions: Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 357 Division I ENGL 300 Division I AMST 300 Division II
DPE Notes: 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.
Attributes: AMST Arts in Context Electives

Class Grid

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