Intersectional/BrontesMorrison

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

ENGL 422: Intersectionalities: Brontës to Morrison – Boylan Spring 2023 Imagine the ghost story newly conjured to understand how we inhabit and move through spaces creating our identities. Participants in this course will read a variety of 19th-21st C novels, films, and visual art to appreciate how ghosted identities embody the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. Texts will include some of the following: novels by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, and Toni Morrison. Films under consideration include Parasite, Get Out and the 2021 West Side Story. Cameron, Whistler, Matisse, Basquiat, Riis, and Parks offer us some visual art/photography portraits underscoring the many and varied nuances of lived experiences. We will benefit from Kimberlée Crenshaw’s insightful call to recognize meaning in how our own and each other’s plethora of personas connect as well as Moya Bailey’s reading of misogynoir that results in traumas and caricatures. The course invites participants a timely and fresh consideration of intersectionality as a symbiotic dialectic between self-perception and the culturally constructed other. Further, we will reflect on the significance of the humanities in exposing the tragically innocent complicity in marginalizing spaces that are courageously resisting falsely easy readings of who we are.