Existential Panic in American Ethnic Literature

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course comprises extensive analyses of the ways in which American ethnic writers engage ontologies of self in characters who attempt to move beyond and out of the existential panic of being seen before they are seen. The direction of the course will move from the promise of Americanness, (i.e., Romanticist notions of self) in traditional American literary works to the legislated self in works by writers of color to modernist and postmodernist pastiche by various ethnic American writers.