2018-2019 University Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2018-2019 University Catalog archived

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ENGL 260 - Literary Approaches to Poverty


FDR: HL
Credits: 3


Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. Examines literary responses to the experience of poverty, imaginative representations of human life in straitened circumstances, and arguments about the causes and consequences of poverty that appear in literature. Critical consideration of dominant paradigms (“the country and the city,” “the deserving poor,” “the two nations,” “from rags to riches,” “the fallen woman,” “the abyss”) augments reading based in cultural contexts. Historical focus will vary according to professor’s areas of interest and expertise.

Fall 2018, ENGL 260-01: Literary Approaches to Poverty: The Radical Power of Storytelling (3). Dorothy Allison, Appalachian poet and novelist, writes, “…stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.” In this course, we examine contemporary American literature concerned with historic poverty, and subsequent trauma, as a condition of material lack that troubles the nation’s founding commitments to individual freedom and social equality. These writers are especially preoccupied with tracking and expressing the physical, psychological, and political effects of want. To better understand the literary treatment of poverty, we consider this writing in relation to ongoing scholarly and political debates about the origins and remedies of economic inequality. We are also especially attentive to the ways that representing poverty creates formal and rhetorical problems that definitively shape this literature: who is telling this story? who is represented? how accurate are those representations? what makes a particular narrative accessible, meaningful or powerful? what is the goal of writing such literature? who is the intended audience? Given the diversity of U.S. populations, we consider dynamics such as race, gender, class, sexuality and political movements along with traditional literary analysis and research. For minors in poverty and human capability, this course supports the program objective of developing critical social consciousness through analysis of fictional and nonfictional literary texts. (HL) Miranda. Staff.




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