123250 AR Literature Course - 1/2 (MA) American/North American & Cultural Studies (2022W)

Whether as ardent imaginaries or as direct demands for social action and transformation, U.S. protest literature, art, and film, are inextricably intertwined with some of the country’s most eruptive and emotional social movements. This course analytically explores literary, cultural, and medial strategies that characterize U.S.-American protest as dealt with in poems, novels, speeches, manifestos, plays, songs, letters, art, photography, films, and digital art. Participants will critically examine a plethora of rhetorical strategies such as empathy, empowerment, symbolic action, intervention, and subversion. In our weekly discussions, we will interrogate and theorize the politics of form, the politics of memory, the politics of appropriation, and the politics of passion, to understand when and how protest cultures have emerged, in which social contexts, and to what private and public effect. We will discuss a selection of national, transnational, and global U.S. protest movements, such as the Revolutionary Period, the Abolitionist Movement, Feminist Movements, the Popular Front, the Civil Rights Movement, The New Left and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Anti-Globalization Movement, as well as the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Early on in the semester, small groups of students will choose a primary source from our syllabus and present their analytic observations on an assigned text. These observations will serve as a critical gateway for all course participants not only to engage in a cooperative discussion about the work at hand, but to further put them into dialogue with their respective historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts.