In this course, we will investigate the politics of storytelling by examining how stories circulate: how they’re told and retold, appropriated and authorized, cited and invoked. We’ll look in particular at what it means to define a text as “literature” and how texts are included and excluded from “literary” status. How are literary texts defined against other types of cultural work? What are the politics of defining a national canon? What are we looking for when we read “literature”? The approach we will take to answering these questions will involve close reading and analysis that is attentive to histories of imperialism, colonization, and nation building. Primary texts will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Additional texts will be available in a course packet and may include work by George Lamming, Henry David Thoreau, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Americo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Paulo Freire, among others. We might also take a look at the debates surrounding the Arizona ban of ethnic studies courses and the restriction of specific literary texts (including some of the texts we will read in class).

Class sessions will include a combination of lecture, discussion, group work, and writing assignments. This course counts as a “W” credit and will require the completion of two 5-7 page papers.