English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, 1:00 to 2:50 pm
In this advanced workshop in expository writing, students will
expand their facility with rhetoric by reading, analyzing, and
writing about a diverse field of critical works such as scholarly
essays, personal narratives, sermons, and magazine articles. Utilizing
such rhetorical strategies and forms revealed through focused
analysis of professional writings, students will write several
essays of their own, including personal narrative and critical
analysis. Students will read creative or critical works by authors
such as Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Jane Tompkins, Pierre Bourdieu,
Marilyn Cooper, and Hinton Als.
English 232: African Women Writers
Professor Huma Ibrahim
Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, 1:00 to 2:50 pm
This course is going to examine several prominent African women
writers of this century: Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa,
Tsitsi Dangeremba, Assia Dejebbar, Nawal el Saadawi, and Ama Ata
Aidoo. These writers have contributed definitively to the more
modern postcolonial times. Their characters, mainly female, grapple
with issues of nationality, gender, and sexuality in an increasingly
turbulent socio-political milieu while continuing a dialogue with
their male counterparts.
In this course we will read the body of selected works from the
writings of the abovementioned writers doing exposition of the
texts and stipulating the struggle of African feminists, a title
that critics have given to all these writers. In addition, we
will examine each writer's relationship to the English language
which started as the colonial's language and later became their
own, often through violent confrontation.
This course is for people who are really interested in the development
of African writing and the particular contribution of women in
this field.
We will be doing close readings and analysis of the texts and
exposition. We will often look at the history and politics of
this region as well and see how the literature contributed or
detracted from an understanding of postcolonial issues such as
national boundaries and culture and identities.
The model we will follow in the class is one of collaborative
discussion. Occasionally I shall give lectures, but for the most
part, we will have discussion groups.
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