Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines international migrancy, cultural identities, or cross-cultural influence in world literatures, while introducing the fundamentals of literary analysis and expository writing. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

How do we perceive ourselves? How do we form our opinions of others? More often than not, the stories we tell are key to understanding, and even creating, personal and/or communal identity. In this class we will discover, through the discussion of texts from various cultural backgrounds, the diverse ways in which narrative allow us to explore, challenge and reformulate definitions of identity. While we discuss notions of identity as they appear in the texts and films on our syllabus, we will focus on developing and improving your critical essay-writing skills. Therefore, we also spend a fair amount of class time doing basic writing activities. Through in-class debate, peer collaboration and writing exercises, we will work towards creating polished comparative essays in which you analyze our readings and films.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

By the end of this course, students will be able to: ·        

• Read a literary text through the lens of critical analysis ·         
• Formulate an argument based on a literary text ·         
• Produce an organized comparative literary essay ·         
• Gain an understanding of the role of narrative in determining individual and cultural identity

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

• Plenzdorf, Ulrich. The New Sufferings of Young W. Waveland Press, 1996. (required) 
• Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Maus I). Pantheon, 1986. (required) 
• Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima. Last Gasp, 2004. (required) 
• Messenger, William E. The Canadian Writer's Handbook. Don Mills, Ont: Oxford University Press, 2012. (recommended)