Abstract
This course presents aspiring teachers with an overview of the contemporary literature of the United States of America, incorporating classical literary and genre fiction together with the literature of two dominant minorities, specifically, Jewish-American, and African American texts. Firstly, the canonistic fiction set will showcase how the American nuanced mythology of expansion intertwines the experiences of the former European pioneer and the Native American. Secondly, Jewish-American fiction will be assessed analyzing their Hebrew linguistic and mythological input, which also entails engaging them in a parallel read with Israeli literature of first and second generations writers. Lastly, and in a similar manner, African American fiction and poetry will be analyzed in connection to its West African roots and Nigerian literature and the Igbo oral tradition.
Borrowing tools from relevant critical schools that engage in genre fiction, Jewish Studies, Israeli Humanities, Critical Race Theory, and West African Studies, students will reflect upon the plural and complex framework that had been informing American literature for the past century and a half. In accordance with the institution's program (as established by Resolution N° 4023/MEGC/14), the syllabus for Literature of the United States engages in the analysis of literary texts considering not only the "stylistic and narratological aspects" that take part in close readings, but the relationship that these texts maintain with the literary canon, the field of audiovisual arts, and "the social, economic, and historical contexts" that inform them. (PCI, 2015)
Those extratextual contexts can be approached productively, according to Fiedler (2008; 1968), when we conceive of the literature of the United States of America as a vast territory that is marked by a topological mythology. When exploring Southern literature, the Western and Northern texts, students will inquire into the ways poetry and literary fiction maintain a dialogue with one another and how they are situated in a historical project marked by material and symbolic expansion (Bhabha, 2010). The motifs of identity, ethnicity, and individual and collective dreams from different nations which characterize contemporary American literature will be studied from a plural perspective.
This is a course that envisions U.S. narratives as complex, multicultural spaces, heavily influenced by historical aspects, foreign and domestic mythologies, and carrying a strong rhetoric of exceptionality (Said, 1993).
In this way, without neglecting the Western canon that so thoroughly informs American literary fiction, this syllabus aims at assessing how the literatures of minorities, specifically, of Jewish American and African American communities, are informed by their mythological, historical, and identity ties with Israel and West Africa. Students will evaluate the direct and indirect relationships that these texts maintain with its direct context of production and the extratextual influences that define it. Thus, critical perspectives regarding Zionism, postcoloniality, genre, ethnicity, and nativism will take
center stage in the class’ work.
Accordingly, this course will offer students the opportunity to approach literary texts in such a way that: a) they denaturalize their own interpretations of what is "literary" (through an approximation to various critical frameworks); b) they foster interdisciplinary dialogue through a comparison of literary and audiovisual productions; c) they explore the close relationship that Americans texts maintain with other traditions, i.e. the Jewish tradition and Israeli Humanities, and the Black tradition and West African humanities; and d) they reflect on the relevance of this course in their future role as teachers within
the Argentine educational system.