ENGL658A: Readings in Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas: Contemporary Latinx Literature and the Built Environment

What is the “built environment”? How does it both reflect and shape who we are as individuals and communities?

In what ways do cultural works—literature especially—contribute to how built environments are imagined, made, sustained, and reproduced? How does the cultural sphere reinforce, negotiate, or challenge dominant models of the built environment found in law, education, commerce, health, transportation, and other social arenas? How is gender and sexuality incorporated into the built environment of the everyday, and how does that incorporation intersect with race, ethnicity, language, class, and other forms of difference that organize power? How is the built environment changing in response to changes in the structures of contemporary racialized capitalism? How does the practice of writing and reading—especially the writing and reading of imaginative literature—give us resources for envisioning more just and more compassionate built environments than the ones that we are usually made to inhabit? These are some of the questions that will frame our study of contemporary Latinx literature. Creative writers on the syllabus include such writers as Elizabeth Acevedo, Carmen Maria Machado, Justin Torres, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, Jennine Capó Crucet, Jaquira Diaz, Luis Alberto Urrea, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Araceli Girmay, Urayoán Noel, and Javier Zamora. Critical writers include such writers as Thorsten Veblen, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, Sigmund Freud, Saskia Sassen, Karen Tongson, Scott Herring, Zaire Dinzey-Flores, John Alba Cutler, Jodi Agius Vallejo, and David R. Diaz.

Section(s):

Dr. Randy Ontiveros
Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Schedule of Classes
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