Reading & Composition

Traveling poets, bodies electric, migrant laborers, road-trippers, tripmaster monkeys… “wandering figures” appear throughout many American literatures. Are these figures akin to each other? Is it possible to talk about them as belonging to a family of related texts?

This course will examine “wandering” and “kinship” as ways to approach questions of interest in the study of American literatures. How do songs of the nation as a welcoming family clash with the realities of the nation as a closed group that excludes wandering “strangers”? What is the relationship between the wandering gaze of the poet-artist and the wandering feet of a migrant laborer? Is wandering an infernal punishment or a delightful chance to “trip” about the world? Is it possible, or desirable, to destabilize the national boundaries of literatures in the Americas? What might the resulting trans-american literature look like?

Students must attend classes, participate in class discussions, work on group projects, and demonstrate thoughtful readings of the assigned texts. Students will turn in a diagnostic essay as well as two progressively longer essays totaling at least 16 typewritten pages, with at least an equal number of pages of preliminary drafting and revising.  Students will be asked to participate in an ongoing web-based dialogue and to give an oral presentation.

Required Texts:

The Inferno – Dante (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

America is in the Heart – Carlos Bulosan

Lolita (Annotated) – Vladimir Nabokov

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book – Maxine Hong Kingston

The Random House Handbook – Frederick Crews

Film:

The Holy Mountain – Alejandro Jodorowski