English 300-04: Junior Year Writing: Caribbean Family Sagas (Fall 2019)
Mo/We 2:30PM – 3:45PM

This seminar will investigate how the conventions of the family-saga novel are used to ease anxieties of belonging among contemporary Caribbean subjects (whose ability to claim the Caribbean as home-space is disrupted by racial alienation, fractured genealogies, and the historical traumas of colonization and slavery) and to authorize or problematize the formation of modern Caribbean nation-states. Students will work hard on developing skills and strategies that support strong academic writing in English-lit classrooms. They will also think carefully about how families are constituted; what it means to represent a nation through the story of a family; what may happen to national futures when women refuse or fail to reproduce; how multi-generational stories map time onto space; and what power is wielded in acts of naming, mis-naming, nick-naming, and refusing to name.

This four-credit course fulfills the Junior-Year Writing requirement; we will spend time thinking about, talking about, and writing literary criticism in various modes and toward various ends. Come prepared to write a lot (in class and out), to share your written work with your peers, and to revise based on feedback. This course is also heavily discussion based. This means we learn collectively, and we rely upon one another to show up, on time and prepared, for the day’s work. There may also be lectures, student presentations, small-group work, and in-class writing and revising activities.

? Required Texts (see schedule for reading order) ?

Tiphanie Yanique, Land of Love and Drowning  ISBN 978-1594633812

Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom  ISBN 978-0993108686

Yanick Lahens, Moonbath (transl. Emily Gogolak) ISBN 978-1941920565

Edouard Glissant, The Fourth Century (transl. Betsy Wing) ISBN 978-0803270831

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Daughters of the Stone  ISBN 978-1732642409

Cristina García, Monkey Hunting  ISBN978-0345466105