Instr:                  Kristie Hamilton
Office:                CRT 478,   229-5959
e-mail:                kgh2@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment

Course Information:                     TR 11:05-12:20   CRT 939
 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course is entitled "American Dreams" because many of the stories we will read depict young people whose effort to understand themselves is shaped by the ideals and hopes of the different cultures, always mixed, of which they are a part and which constitute American culture at large. Our authors write about Americans and, in one book, Canadians who are descended from native peoples of this continent, from people of Africa, Sweden, the now Czech Republic, France, Eastern Europe, China, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, South Asia, Mexico and Japan. The stories they tell will reveal the sometimes less visible impact of merging national and cultural histories on the lives of individuals across generations.

The novels and short stories we will read and the film we will see are rich--incredibly moving, funny, shocking, or tragic--because, in part, they diverge from and complicate the standard, generic, middle-class "American dream": house with picket fence, marriage, 2.5 kids, individual material success, anyone-can-do-it...That Story. We live in a time that seems to welcome cultural, racial and ethnic diversity, but, through these stories, we will be asked to examine the problems created both in the past and in the present by assumptions about the differences among people, differences that are defined in terms of "race" and/or "ethnicity." The authors above dramatize the consequences of such assumptions in the fictional lives of characters we will come to care about, who are simply trying to grow up, or to deal with parents' and grandparents' and peers' and a nation's expectations--characters who are trying to hope and to decide who they are and who they can and cannot OR will not become. Their stories are unforgettable.

Required Texts:
Anzia Yezierska's Breadgivers, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Willa Cather's O Pioneers! Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Junot Diaz's Drown, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban. Also, short stories by Leslie Silko, Helena Viramontes, Cherrie Moraga, and Jhumpa Lahiri; and the film Smoke Signals.

Course Requirements:
1-page response papers for each story we read or view;
two 3-5 page formal essays (each revised once);
one in-class final exam essay.
One in-town field-trip or campus activity related to course topic.