In this course, we will all be examining our roles as critics who read, think, and write about literary and cultural texts. As literary critics, we will begin by engaging in close textual analyses of the ways that stories are told and the narrative strategies writers use to challenge or transform the material conditions of their lives. We will discuss basic literary terminology, concepts, methods, and practices that illustrate the connections among people who read and write texts and the larger conditions of production and systems of power in which their texts are produced and read. We will be analyzing different genres of writing (poetry, short stories, novels, films, autobiographies, personal essays, inscriptions of mo‘olelo) and how these forms are used in ways that respond to material conditions, including historical events and movements.
We will be focusing in particular on definitions and discussions of ideology and the social relations of power that underpin the ideological functions of literature. With this in mind, we will compare different points of entry into analyzing a range of texts assigned for the course, approaches that foreground issues of class, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, indigeneity, and location, and then we will examine how these multiple and interlocking critical frameworks cannot be separated from each other even as they are often made (problematically) to compete with each other. Some approaches, like literary mapping techniques, go beyond an emplotment of geographical spaces to mapping the social relations between people, their relationship to land, and the epistemological underpinnings of these relationships. We will also map out our own positionality as readers as we engage in a careful examination of the processes by which we “make meaning.”
Requirements: One two-page paper, two four-page papers, peer-editing, short assignments, a final exam, attendance and participation.
Possible required Texts (will be available at UH Bookstore):
R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s (1995)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Brandy Nālani McDougall, The Salt-Wind / Ka Makani Pa‘akai (2008)
Out of print–order through Amazon used copies or purchase class photocopy:
Wachowski Brothers. The Matrix: The Shooting Script (2001)
Required course reader may include readings by Herman Melville, ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Claude McKay, Louis Althusser, Ho‘oulumāhiehie, John Fiske, Slavoj Zizek, Shakespeare, Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, Avery Gordon, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Norma Alarcon, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Jeff Chang, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Puanani Burgess, Gwendolyn Brooks, Noenoe Silva, Hazel
Carby, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and others. The course reader will be available during the second week of school.