Course Schedule

In addition to the links to the handouts that are listed below for any of the days when a handout was provided in class, a complete list of links to all such handouts is also provided at the bottom of this page. However, any readings that are provided via a handout will be found instead by logging into the class Elearning site.

The schedule for class presentations is here.

Week 1

Introduction: The  Challenges and Opportunities of Pluralism

• syllabus

• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (excerpts)
• William Riker, “Social Choice and Constitutional Theory” (excerpt: “The Preservation of Liberal Democracy”)
• The Bill of Rights
• Steven G. Gey, Religion and State (excerpts)
• James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments”
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (excerpts)

Handouts:

• reading journal
• presentation assignment
• close readings assignment

Week 2

Home

• Michael Anthony, “Sandra Street”
• Vanessa Howard, “Escape the Ghettos of New York”
• Luis Cabalquinto, “Hometown”

• Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Freeway 280”
• Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir”

Week 3

Family

• Naomi Long Madgett, “Offspring”

Due: Short Essay 1

Week 4

Heritage

• “Setting,” available in Elearning.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind (Part I) (Available in Elearning as “Shelley”
  • How is the opening invocation of Shelley’s poem similar or different from the opening of Long Soldier’s WHEREAS? Who or what could she be implicitly invoking?

• William Saroyan, “Najari Levon’s Old Country Advice to the Young Americans on How to Live with a Snake”
• Muriel Rukeyser, “To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century”
• Maya Angelou, “Africa”

Week 5

Language

• A Pluralist America
• Home and Family in Poet X

Handouts:

• Explanation of Différance
• 2009 Congressional Apology

• Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons” (Elearning)

Week 6

Aliens

• Style (Elearning)

• Diane Burns, “Sure You Can Ask Me a Question”
• Perry Brass, “I Think the New Teacher’s a Queer”

Sara Lupita Olivares, “Of Small Spaces,” from Migratory Sound (Elearning)

• Focus on the format for this one. How is form entangled with meaning?

Handouts:

• final paper
• James Schuyler, “Hymn to Life” (Elearning) (Relevant to Reed, “About a White City, in Indecency)

Week 7

Fences

Watched in Class (two clips of the same scene from August Wilson’s Fences:

• James Earl Jones & Courtney Vance version
• Denzel Washington & Jovan Adepo version

Handouts (related to readings and discussion):

• Johnson Case Fact (Center for HIV Law & Policy)
• State of Missouri vs. Michael Johnson

Handouts (tips for writing papers):

• analysis sandwich
• levels of abstraction

Uploaded to Elearning:

• A copy of a published article I wrote on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. 
  • Might give you a better sense of what a literary essay can look like, including integration and citation of sources.
  • Feel free to ask me about my writing choices!

Bonus material for your consideration:

• What do you make of this description of Justice Clarence Thomas?: Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Race (New Yorker)

Week 8

Crossing

• Symbolism (Elearning)

Week 9

Spring Break

Week 10

Americans

Week 11

Beliefs

Due: Short Essay 4

Handouts:

• Speaker (Elearning)

Week 12

Rebirth

Week 13

The World

• Theme (Elearning)

Week 14

Self-Reflection

Week 15

Review

Finals