In this course, we will study the multidimensional and interdependent nature of US-Mexico Borderlands literature in terms of bodily subjectivities, postmodernity, spatial and geographical identities, and contemporary ecocritical theories that reflect a discourse of responses to global change. Some questions that will focus our discussions include: How do issues of subjectivity, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality influence a culture of the Borderlands? What kinds of narrations result from intercultural crossings between the United States and Mexico? How do spatial ontologies speak to the formation of subjectivity, identity, and sociality on the Borderlands? We will read a representative survey of fiction, critical essays, and drama and apply the theoretical articulations of border theory, postcolonial theory, and third space theories to bring into conversation various territorial and metaphorical intersections between the U.S. and Mexico with the goal of illuminating how individual subjectivities negotiate local, national, and global borders (transfronteras) of experience, theory, and history. Readings include works by: Anzaldúa, Islas, Arias, Morales, Viramontes, McMurtry, McCarthy, Castillo, Moraga, Soja, Sandoval, and Bhabha.

This semester we will examine parallel themes, scenes and characters, as well as adaptations, between prominent nineteenth century authors on both sides of the Atlantic. We will read Dickens, Oliver Twist; The Brontes, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights; Louisa May Alcott, Moods, Work, and A Long Fatal Love Chase; George Eliot, Adam Bede; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; and Henry James, The American. We will also read recent theory: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor's collection, Transatlantic Literary Studies, and Paul Giles, Atlantic Republic: American Tradition in English Literature. The social outcast figures of the orphan, the criminal, the thief, the demonic hero and the prostitute will be studied as well as marginal female employment in needlework and acting, as well as the positions of governess and companion. Focus will center on gender, class, marriage and religion. We will study the impact of historical events upon literary reflections of racism and gender discrimination, such as the Civil War in America and the British Indian Uprising. Requirements include, first, two short fiction/film papers (grades will be averaged to count as one unit); second, a long written paper on the student's choice of subject within an assigned topic; third, an oral presentation of that paper on the due date; fourth, a final; and fifth, class participation. Each of these five requirements will count 20% of the final grade. Topics for transnational treatment might include one of the following suggestions, studied in relation to the presentation text and another 19^th century text, either from our class reading list or another of the student's selection from the period: Victorian morality and conventionality, death and Victorian heroes or heroines, landscapes and politics, ghosts in Victorian fiction, alcohol and downfall, the demonic hero, pitfalls of classism, racism, gender dynamics, religion, and personal conscience.

This course will survey American literature and culture during the decades leading up to and including the early national period (c. 1750 to 1820). Our readings will come from classic legal, literary, political, religious, scientific, and visual texts that reflect on the meaning of Enlightenment, Revolution, and America's movement from colony to nation and empire. We will consider what Revolutionary ideals and post-Revolutionary politics meant for women and men, free and enslaved, Indian and white, rich and poor, urban and rural; examine the meaning and limitations of "Enlightenment" in the Atlantic world; explore the formation of the "republic of letters" in its transatlantic context; and investigate the multiple geographies and cultures that shaped national identity as it emerged. The course will chart the rise of literary forms of expression in America – such as the slave narrative, autobiography, and novel – as well as examine critical responses that continue to shape the field of early American literary studies. Required texts: Thomas Jefferson, The Portable Thomas Jefferson (Penguin); Thomas Paine, The Thomas Paine Reader (Penguin); Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (Penguin); Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Yale); Jonathan Edwards, A Jonathan Edwards Reader (Yale); William Byrd, William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line (Dover); J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Penguin); The Federalist Papers (Penguin); The Anti-Federalist Papers (Signet); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (Penguin); Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Penguin). Secondary readings will be made available.

This course investigates the diverse representations of the American War in Vietnam against what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “Empire” and what William Spanos defines as “American exceptionalism in the age of globalization.” We begin by scrutinizing Graham Green's Quiet American and Monique Truong's The Book of Salt and screening the French film, Indochine, with a focus on the differences between the European colonial power and the American regime of Empire. We then read Joan Didion's Democracy and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night and explore how democracy and history are envisioned and intertwined in late capitalism. We concentrate on Michael Herr's Dispatches, Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, and Lynda De Devanter's Home before Morning, which foreground issues of time-space compression, simulation and simulacrum, and the return of the repressed. Meanwhile, we also get a glimpse of the North Vietnamese perspective through examination of Bao Nin's Sorrow of War. We conclude by exploring the ecological sensibility in James Janko's Buffalo Boy and Geronimo and considering the relationship between Empire and migration in Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Primary literary texts: Lynda Van Devanter, Home before Morning; Joan Didion, Democracy; Graham Green, The Quiet American; Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places; Michael Herr, Dispatches; James Janko, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night; Bao Nin, The Sorrow of War; Tim O'Brien, Going after Cacciato; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt. Primary visual texts: From Hollywood to Hanoi; Hearts and Minds; Indochine; Why We Fight. Secondary texts: William Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization; a collection of essays in PDF file will be posted on the course page on Blackboard.

We will examine the vital role of landscape and Nature in works of film and fiction that both establish and challenge the genre of the Western. Some will be classics (both literary and filmic) and some will undermine, subvert, or expand our ideas about what Westerns are, what they mean, what they do and why the portrayal of the natural world is so important in all of them. We will explore these texts from a number of different angles: How and why is the the myth of the frontier tied so closely to landscape? How have masculine and Anglo-American ideas about the “proper” relationship of humans to Nature been used to justify or deconstruct American ideas about conquest, colonization, and empire? How do our notions about Nature work to define contemporary ideas about gender, race, class, sexuality, and national identity? Why, over a hundred years after the official close of the last geographic frontier in the lower 48 states (in 1892) are we still writing and filming Westerns? How is the Western so intricately tied to historical issues, and what might be present and future directions? Likely texts include: Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912); Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By (1961); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977); Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985). Likely films include: John Ford, Stagecoach (1939); John Ford, The Searchers (1956); Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979); Robert M. Young, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982); Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves (1990); Stephen Frears, The Hi-Lo Country (1998); Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain (2005); James Cameron, Avatar (2009). Likely theory: Kasdan, et al., Critical Eye; Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by ‘Duel in the Sun'”; Selections from Ella Shohat & Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994); Selections from Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996); Selections from Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (2001); Selections from Michael Johnson, Hunger for the Wild: America's Obsession the Untamed West (2007).

The course will begin with the earlier period as seen through the historical allegories of Hawthorne, including "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Maypole of Merrymount," and "The Scarlet Letter." We will study Poe's pre-Civil War racial satires "Hopfrog" and "The Black Cat" as well as "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym." The gothic tales of A. Bernard, a.k.a. Louisa May Alcott, will be represented by her class and gender study, "Behind a Mask," among others; the Civil War stories in her autobiographical "Hospital Sketches" and "My Contraband" depict her experiences as a Civil War Nurse in Union Hospital, a converted hotel. We will read the later ghost stories of Henry James such as "The Turn of the Screw," and Edith Wharton's "The Lady's Maid's Bell." Our twin focus in this course will be upon the gothic tradition as well as nineteenth-century literature's portrait of history and the issues of race, gender and class. In addition, we will read three critical works. Teresa Goddu's Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation gives close analysis of Hawthorne, Alcott and Poe, while Andrew Smith's Gothic Literature provides necessary European background. Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the Civil War by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber will provide added historical context. Requirements include a 15-to-20 page paper on the student's selection from a list of topics, an oral presentation of that paper, three very short fiction/film papers, and a final.

While U.S. regionalism is usually considered a nineteenth-century development, this course begins by examining the even earlier roots of the notions of “North” and “South,” starting with Anglo-American writing of the early eighteenth century such as William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line (1728) that considers everything below Virginia to be productive of “gross humours” and a great “refuge for all debtors and fugitives.” Together we will consider various genres of writing that arose as America moved from colony to nation and empire, and ask how they imagine the diverse climates, geographies, and populations that America's ever-changing borders sought to contain. As we read both classic and lesser known literary works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we will focus on the constantly contested notion of nationhood. In particular, we will think about how concepts of sovereignty, possession, expansion, settlement, and founding that develop in response to various southern topographies and climates put pressure on the more salient ideals of national identity that took shape on northern grounds.

In this course we will examine 20^th and 21^st century texts engaging and challenging the myth of the frontier, including works by Native American, Chicano/a, Asian American, and Anglo American writers and directors. We will be exploring these texts from a number of different angles: What did the myth of the frontier look like in the past and what shape is it assuming in American culture today? How has it been used to justify or deconstruct contemporary American ideas about conquest, colonization, and empire? How might it work to define our ideas about gender, race, class, sexuality, national identity, borders, the environment, etc.? How has the myth of the frontier formed the genre we know today as the “Western” and why are we still writing and producing such texts? How do the works of non-Anglos writing from "the other side" of the frontier reinterpret that myth? We will be doing close readings of novels, films, and theory.