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

Course Information:                     TR  3:30-4:45,                   CRT 939
 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
 
In this course we will read extraordinary stories about ordinary people for whom migration from "old worlds" to new frontiers in search of work, a new beginning, a home, or a newly realized selfhood is the stuff of which dreams, tragedies and survival are made. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an increase in the immigration of Europeans to the United States and in the migration of diverse working-class Americans from rural to urban areas and from urban centers to agricultural regions. Thus, mobility, place and displacement  became central themes in American fiction of this period. Though seldom studied together, the novels of John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston and Willa Cather vividly portray the passions, the laughter, the love and the sorrows of migrating peoples and members of immigrant communities.

In O Pioneers!, Willa Cather describes two of the most powerful forces at work in the fiction we will study: "The great fact was the land itself" and "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." We will discover how Steinbeck, Cather, and Hurston write histories of hearts on the move, of the land that sustains or overpowers men and women and of the desires that move characters and communities to seek a place to stop and stay. Short stories, African American folk tales, and novels of this period incorporate these themes with a mixture of social realism, myth, and history. We'll investigate the way literary forms express and give shape to the experiences of people within migratory and immigrant communities, and ponder the struggles and victories of migrant workers, of small-town families, and of pioneers. Such clichés as "America is a nation on the move" and such metaphors as "America, the great melting pot" will come under our scrutiny and will take on new meaning. We will learn not only about the literary histories of realism, regionalism, and modernism but also about
ourselves and our own intertwining histories.

Reading
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, My Antonia, A Lost Lady
Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men (selections)
John Steinbeck, The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men