| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN PLACES | SWEENEY, E. | From the parlor to the football stadium to Main Street, places direct human action and transmit various messages about race, class, and gender and sexuality: how much and what kind of access do different people have to a place? Who can move within and between places, and how? What signals who “belongs” in a place and who is marked as an outsider or transgressor? This course will examine built spaces in twentieth-century multiethnic American literature—dwellings, workplaces, schools, churches, courthouses, public squares—to explore intersections in how Americans thought about built space, literary craft, and nation-building. Scrutinizing places in American literature will involve thinking not only about how one reads texts and constructs buildings, but also about how one might construct texts and read buildings; accordingly, we will attend to authors as architects erecting a structure, and also to architects as authors designing spaces that will afford or prohibit certain kinds of human action and social relations. With this context, we will examine how places are designed, used, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce gender, racial, and social distinctions. We will also find resistant, subversive, and innovative spatial practices that seek to challenge such naturalized hierarchies. Over the quarter, we will identify connections between literary places and social mobility; race and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; transgression and activism; performance and passing; and much more. Course assignments will include reading responses, two short papers, and an online final exam; course authors will include Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Thomas Pynchon, Junot Diaz, and more. |