Every semester, I post my syllabi here. This fall semester the class may look a little different, but the main goals remain. I’m teaching an ethnic American literature class this fall, and the texts that I have chosen to teach this semester come, as usual, from partly my own desire to expand my own knowledge and understanding of different ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures. As … Read More Ethnic American Literature Syllabus
+ african american literature, alice walker, american literature, dorie miller, ernest j gaines, Literature, southern literature, the autobiography of miss jane pittman, the third life of grange copeland
Today, I’m going to finish the discussion I began last week on history and the ways that we construct meaning. In the last post, I looked at Ernest J. Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). For this post, I will focus on one more scene from Gaines’ novel then move on to look at a section from Alice Walker’s The Third Life … Read More History and Education in Alice Walker’s “The Third Life of Grange Copeland”
+ african american literature, alice walker, american literature, ernest j gaines, julius lester, Literature, look out whitey!, louisiana literature, peter burke, southern literature, the autobiography of miss jane pittman, twentieth century literature, varieties of cultural history
Over the past couple of posts, I have written about the role of history and literature in countering prevailing myths about the past and the present. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at a couple of scene from Ernest J. Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). On Thursday, I will finish this series by looking at a section from … Read More “Miss Jane is not in them”: Voices in Historical Narratives
+ american literature, blues for mister charlie, huck finn, interracial intimacy, interracial marriage, lillian e smith, Literature, of love and dust
Lillian E. Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) has been on my shelf for a few years now. Right now, it sits back in the United States, untouched and locked away in a box in a storage room. When I purchased it, at a book sale, it was one of those books that I had heard about and that looked relevant to my research. I bought … Read More Dirt in Lillian E. Smith’s “Strange Fruit”
+ african american literature, american literature, Americans Want to Believe Jobs are the Solution to Poverty. They're Not, caribbean literature, drown, Junot Díaz, Literature, matthew desmond, yunior
Reading Junot Díaz’s “Drown,” my mind constantly kept going back to texts such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and James Baldwin who said, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” Along with these items, I also thought about the power structures that keep Yunior de Las Casas in subjugation and essentially strip … Read More Education and Poverty in Junot Díaz’s “Drown”
Interminable Rambling 