ENGLISH

 you can watch Get Out, which is playing in theaters now, by writing me a one-page response to the film as it relates to our course:

This semester we will be concentrating on essays and novels written by Black American writers (contextualized by one Asian American writer), mostly published around the middle of the twentieth century in America. You can consider this a kind of Black Lives Matter syllabus, in a manner of speaking. It’s no shock to anyone, regardless of which side of the partisan tape you stand, that this is a difficult time in American history, especially with regards to whose lives matter in American citizenship, and how. We will spend the entire semester reading some of the formative Black writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement, and what their fiction and nonfiction communicate regarding identity, and how those ideas have changed, improved, been intensified, from then to now. Jeff Chang’s text will show us where we are now, and the rest of the syllabus’s texts will tell us where we came from. As we discuss these BIG ideas, we’ll also look at these texts as fundamental American literature, and attempt to break down themes, characters, and narratives. What do these narratives reveal that are counter-narratives—in other words, new narratives, especially at the time of publication, told by bodies the American reading public hadn’t seen before? What can they teach us about our own stories, our own resistances, our own selves? I sincerely look forward to seeing how each of you respond to the course.