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

Available on Elearning as “Home”:

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

Available on Elearning as “Home”:

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

Week 3

Family

Available on Elearning as “Family”:

• Naomi Long Madgett, “Offspring”

Due: Short Essay 1

Week 4

Heritage

Handouts:

• “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?

Available in Elearning as “Heritage”:

• 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

Skim these two posts summarizing the beginning of our semester journey:

• A Pluralist America
• Home and Family in Poet X

Handouts:

• Explanation of Différance
• 2009 Congressional Apology

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

Week 6

Aliens

Handouts:

• Style (Elearning)

Available in Elearning as “Aliens”:

• 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

Skim: Heritage and Language in WHEREAS

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

• 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

Handouts:

• 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

Handouts:

• Theme (Elearning)

Week 14

Self-Reflection

Week 15

Review

Finals