ASPP - UT/ GT.1070/ 2070 Sem 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Kathy Engel
ASPP - UT.1070.001 (Undergraduates)
ASPP - GT 2070.001 (Graduate section)
Undergraduate and Graduate
Mondays 3:30 – 6:15pm
4 points – will count toward general education requirements (Humanities)
This is a close reading and craft writing class that will look at the poetry, essays, and narratives of writers who traverse forms, their work inextricably related to community and social engagement. We will look at the question of what constitutes “action” or “activism” and how writing and language can be those transformative engagements, deconstructing cliché’s that suggest the contrary. At the same time we will discuss the relationship of writing to other forms of action and the complex ways conditions mandate form. We will explore the work from the perspectives of craft, impact, identity, “scripting,” community, the relationship of personal to political, memory, and boundary breaking, to begin with. We will examine the texts to understand the connection to community and activism, looking at the complexities and conflicts that arise in the context of making art and working to make an impact on public life. We will interrogate questions of quality and aesthetics, popular culture, compromise, truth, authenticity, voice, beauty, responsibility, fact, and translation as a world view in the 21st Century.
While studying the work of June Jordan, Martin Espada, Mahmoud Darwish, Alexis De Veaux, Eduardo Galeano, D.A. Powell, Gloria Anzaldua, Joy Harjo, Patricia Smith, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Cornelius Eady, Valzhyna Mort, Suheir Hammad, and Tina Chang, the students will concurrently delve deeply into their own writing processes.
We will explore questions related to the work of the scribe, the teller or artist, to a given community, event, and history itself, the ethical issues involved in “truth” and “story,” how writers and social narrators deal with plural and counter narratives and some of the problems inherent, and the many traditions within telling. We will examine questions of voice, power, silence, the question of “persona” writing, inhabiting another’s experience.
