An important note about the content of this course. Please read.
Many of the texts we will read (watch and hear) for this class explore complex and disturbing content and include graphic and offensive imagery and language that can produce strong emotions and reactions. My hope is that this class will provide opportunities for us to explore important and challenging topics and ideas together in an environment in which we feel both safe and brave. We should be sensitive to how we may react to some of the texts we will read, analyze, and discuss and allow ourselves to process these reactions in healthy and meaningful ways. To that end, it's important that we are thoughtful about the language and tone we use when discussing these topics and ideas. Similarly, we should be mindful of what we might need to best explore, understand, and process our experiences with the texts we read and the conversations we have. Below is a list of some of the challenging and complex topics our texts explore. If you feel that you will have difficulty reading about and/or discussing any of these topics, please speak with your dean and/or a school counselor about this matter as soon as possible so that you can be supported in the best ways possible. The texts we will read may include depictions, descriptions, and/or discussions of the following: physical, verbal, domestic, and/or sexual abuse, assault, and violence; self-harm; mental and physical illness and/or injury; death; family separations/divorce; and natural disasters. Please let me know (at any time throughout the course or after its completion) if there is anything I can do or avoid doing to support our reading and discussions about sensitive content.
A note about what you create (write, record, etc.) for this class. Please read.
Similar to the reading content of this class, the content you produce for our class may explore complex and disturbing content and include graphic and offensive imagery for creative reasons. If you choose to include such material (the nature of which is described in more detail above), it's important that you do a few things: 1) Discuss your choices with me before you write, and 2) Include a brief note about your choices and whether they are entirely imagined or are grounded in lived experiences of your own or other living or deceased people. I ask you to do this because I am required by law to report any incidents of abuse whether seen or read or heard. So, if I do not explicitly know that what you wrote is fiction, I must assume it is not. More importantly, it's important that any acts of abuse are addressed in the most helpful and healthy ways, and often that requires the help of trained and trauma-informed people. Again, please let me know (at any time throughout the course or after its completion) if there is anything I can do to support you or your friends or family.
Many of the texts we will read (watch and hear) for this class explore complex and disturbing content and include graphic and offensive imagery and language that can produce strong emotions and reactions. My hope is that this class will provide opportunities for us to explore important and challenging topics and ideas together in an environment in which we feel both safe and brave. We should be sensitive to how we may react to some of the texts we will read, analyze, and discuss and allow ourselves to process these reactions in healthy and meaningful ways. To that end, it's important that we are thoughtful about the language and tone we use when discussing these topics and ideas. Similarly, we should be mindful of what we might need to best explore, understand, and process our experiences with the texts we read and the conversations we have. Below is a list of some of the challenging and complex topics our texts explore. If you feel that you will have difficulty reading about and/or discussing any of these topics, please speak with your dean and/or a school counselor about this matter as soon as possible so that you can be supported in the best ways possible. The texts we will read may include depictions, descriptions, and/or discussions of the following: physical, verbal, domestic, and/or sexual abuse, assault, and violence; self-harm; mental and physical illness and/or injury; death; family separations/divorce; and natural disasters. Please let me know (at any time throughout the course or after its completion) if there is anything I can do or avoid doing to support our reading and discussions about sensitive content.
A note about what you create (write, record, etc.) for this class. Please read.
Similar to the reading content of this class, the content you produce for our class may explore complex and disturbing content and include graphic and offensive imagery for creative reasons. If you choose to include such material (the nature of which is described in more detail above), it's important that you do a few things: 1) Discuss your choices with me before you write, and 2) Include a brief note about your choices and whether they are entirely imagined or are grounded in lived experiences of your own or other living or deceased people. I ask you to do this because I am required by law to report any incidents of abuse whether seen or read or heard. So, if I do not explicitly know that what you wrote is fiction, I must assume it is not. More importantly, it's important that any acts of abuse are addressed in the most helpful and healthy ways, and often that requires the help of trained and trauma-informed people. Again, please let me know (at any time throughout the course or after its completion) if there is anything I can do to support you or your friends or family.
Please download the free samples for the following digital texts (links are for Apple iBooks, but feel free to use the Kindle app for these titles).
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (purchase iBook or Kindle edition)
- There, There by Tommy Orange
Please download the following iBooks. (These are free iBooks I created.)
SHORT STORIES
All That, David Foster Wallace
A & P, John Updike
A RIDE OUT OF PHRAO, Dina Nayeris
A Temporary Matter, Jhumpa Lahiri
At the Bottom of New Lake, Sonya Larson
Agreeable, Jonathan Franzen
Assimilation, E.L. Doctorow
Blue Winds Dancing, by Thomas S. Whitecloud
Cathedral, Raymond Carver
Charybdis, Cole Becher
Cowboys and East Indians, by Nina McConigley
Desiree's Baby, by Kate Chopin
Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor (pdf) (audio)
Good Old Neon, David Foster Wallace
Good People, David Foster Wallace
Hell-Heaven, Jhumpa Lahiri
How Did You Feel About It, Adichie
How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O'Brien
Hot Air Balloons, Edwidge Danticat
How To Date A Brown Girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie), Junot Diaz
Impressions of an Indian Childhood, Zitkala-Sa (aka Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)
In The American Society, Gish Jen (not online)
Jon, George Saunders
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies, Eudora Welty
Minister's Black Veil, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moon Lake, Eudora Welty (pdf via JStor)
Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan
Motherfuckers, Roxane Gay
No More Maybe, by Gish Jen
Now More Than Ever, Zadie Smith
Old Boys, Old Girls, Edward P. Jones
Paul's Case, Willa Cather
Po' Sandy, Charles Chesnutt
Ranch Girl, Maile Meloy
Serving in Florida, Barbara Ehrenreich (doc only)
Silver Water, Amy Bloom (link to pdf)
Smokers, Tobias Wolff
Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin
The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin
The Americans, Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Belonging Kind, by John Shirley, William Gibson
The Flower, by Louise Erdrich
The Lesson, by Toni Cade Bambara
The Loudest Voice, by Grace Paley
The Semplica-Girl Diaries, George Saunders
The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (sample iBook, This Is Not Chick Lit, ed. Elizabeth Merrick)
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Three stories by Lydia Davis
Two-Step, Maile Meloy
What You Pawn I Will Redeem, by Sherman Alexie
Winter Dreams, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writing Teacher, by John Edgar Wideman
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
ESSAYS & ARTICLES
A Plague of Tics, David Sedaris (via This American Life audio recording of reading, transcript here)
A Question of Identity
Amy Schumer To Fan Who Facetuned Her Bikini Photo: ‘I Love My Body’, via Huffington Post
A Poem in The Nation Spurs a Backlash and an Apology
Asian name
BALANCING BOLLYWOOD INSPIRATION WITH AMERICAN EXPECTATIONS
Can we choose our own identity?
Dear 14-Year-Old Boy, You Are Not Entitled to Sex , Hanif Abdurraqib
Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself
Go Carolina, David Sedaris
How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston
How Junot Diaz Wrote a Sexist Character, but Not a Sexist Book
How Rugrats Made Me Feel Comfortable in America
How watching football helped me understand people who deny climate change
I Feel Invisible
I’m a White Man. Hear Me Out
I’m Ghanaian-American. Am I Black?
In Middle School, ‘You’re Trying to Build a Parachute as You’re Falling’
'Is this racist or white privilege?' After poem rejected 40 times, white poet publishes it under
"It Just Felt Very Wrong': Sherman Alexie's Accusers Go On The Record" from NPR
Jhumpa Lahiri's Struggle To Feel American
Learning To Read, Malcolm X
Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not Here to Make Friends
On Being a Cripple,
Paper Tigers
Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Strivings of the Negro People, W.E.B. DuBois
'Strong' Black Woman? 'Smart' Asian Man? The Downside To Positive Stereotypes
Student: How Identity Politics Ruined My High School, by Jon Miltimore
The Changeling
The His'er Problem, Anne Fadiman
The Dos and Don’ts of Cultural Appropriation
The Poet, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Problem With ‘Speaking as a …’
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
Whose Story (and Country) Is This?
You Don't Have To Be Crazy To Work Here, But It Helps, John Lovell (via This American Life, audio recording of reading, transcript here)
POEMS
Muzzle Magazine; Vital Signs: The Life of Poetry A blog series in which poets have been asked to write about poems that have mattered to them in some way—whether that way be through personal revelation, aesthetic inspiration, catharsis, or something else entirely.
A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades, June Jordan
CITIZEN, Claudia Rankine
Double Exposure, May Swenson
Haircut, Elizabeth Alexander
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, Hanif Abdurraqib
Howl, Allen Ginsberg
In The City, Chen Chen
I Sing The Body Electric, Walt Whitman
from Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, Dawn Lundy Martin
Lines Composed at 34 North Park Street, on Certain Memories of My White Grandmother Who nayyirah waheed https://www.instagram.com/nayyirah.waheed/?hl=en
Loved Me and Hated Black People Like Myself. July 15, 2017, Shane McCrae
Perhaps the World Ends Here, by Joy Harjo
real poem (personal statement), Rachel Zucker
Theme for English B, Langston Hughes
Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
We Should Make a Documentary About Spades, Terrance Hayes
What I Am, Terrance Hayes
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen
Why I Hate Raisins, by Natalie Diaz
VIDEOS
25 Mini-Films for Exploring Race, Bias and Identity With Students
A Conversation With Native Americans On Race
Arguments Against Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #20
Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive
I'm Not Racists, Joyner Lucas
Is Gender REAL? – 8-Bit Philosophy
Personal Identity - Philosophy Tube
Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #19
Personhood: Crash Course Philosophy #21
Real Life as a Young and Native American
Satirizing "code-switching" on screen
Situations, Claudia Rankine and John Lucas
The Disturbing History of the Suburbs
The Importance of Queer Allyship in the Classroom
The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes
Theorist Judith Butler Explains How Behavior Creates Gender: A Short Introduction to “Gender Performativity”
WATCH JUDITH BUTLER AND SUNAURA TAYLOR GO FOR A WALK, DECONSTRUCT IT.
All That, David Foster Wallace
A & P, John Updike
A RIDE OUT OF PHRAO, Dina Nayeris
A Temporary Matter, Jhumpa Lahiri
At the Bottom of New Lake, Sonya Larson
Agreeable, Jonathan Franzen
Assimilation, E.L. Doctorow
Blue Winds Dancing, by Thomas S. Whitecloud
Cathedral, Raymond Carver
Charybdis, Cole Becher
Cowboys and East Indians, by Nina McConigley
Desiree's Baby, by Kate Chopin
Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor (pdf) (audio)
Good Old Neon, David Foster Wallace
Good People, David Foster Wallace
Hell-Heaven, Jhumpa Lahiri
How Did You Feel About It, Adichie
How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O'Brien
Hot Air Balloons, Edwidge Danticat
How To Date A Brown Girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie), Junot Diaz
Impressions of an Indian Childhood, Zitkala-Sa (aka Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)
In The American Society, Gish Jen (not online)
Jon, George Saunders
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies, Eudora Welty
Minister's Black Veil, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moon Lake, Eudora Welty (pdf via JStor)
Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan
Motherfuckers, Roxane Gay
No More Maybe, by Gish Jen
Now More Than Ever, Zadie Smith
Old Boys, Old Girls, Edward P. Jones
Paul's Case, Willa Cather
Po' Sandy, Charles Chesnutt
Ranch Girl, Maile Meloy
Serving in Florida, Barbara Ehrenreich (doc only)
Silver Water, Amy Bloom (link to pdf)
Smokers, Tobias Wolff
Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin
The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin
The Americans, Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Belonging Kind, by John Shirley, William Gibson
The Flower, by Louise Erdrich
The Lesson, by Toni Cade Bambara
The Loudest Voice, by Grace Paley
The Semplica-Girl Diaries, George Saunders
The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (sample iBook, This Is Not Chick Lit, ed. Elizabeth Merrick)
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Three stories by Lydia Davis
Two-Step, Maile Meloy
What You Pawn I Will Redeem, by Sherman Alexie
Winter Dreams, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writing Teacher, by John Edgar Wideman
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
ESSAYS & ARTICLES
A Plague of Tics, David Sedaris (via This American Life audio recording of reading, transcript here)
A Question of Identity
Amy Schumer To Fan Who Facetuned Her Bikini Photo: ‘I Love My Body’, via Huffington Post
A Poem in The Nation Spurs a Backlash and an Apology
Asian name
BALANCING BOLLYWOOD INSPIRATION WITH AMERICAN EXPECTATIONS
Can we choose our own identity?
Dear 14-Year-Old Boy, You Are Not Entitled to Sex , Hanif Abdurraqib
Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself
Go Carolina, David Sedaris
How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston
How Junot Diaz Wrote a Sexist Character, but Not a Sexist Book
How Rugrats Made Me Feel Comfortable in America
How watching football helped me understand people who deny climate change
I Feel Invisible
I’m a White Man. Hear Me Out
I’m Ghanaian-American. Am I Black?
In Middle School, ‘You’re Trying to Build a Parachute as You’re Falling’
'Is this racist or white privilege?' After poem rejected 40 times, white poet publishes it under
"It Just Felt Very Wrong': Sherman Alexie's Accusers Go On The Record" from NPR
Jhumpa Lahiri's Struggle To Feel American
Learning To Read, Malcolm X
Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not Here to Make Friends
On Being a Cripple,
Paper Tigers
Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Strivings of the Negro People, W.E.B. DuBois
'Strong' Black Woman? 'Smart' Asian Man? The Downside To Positive Stereotypes
Student: How Identity Politics Ruined My High School, by Jon Miltimore
The Changeling
The His'er Problem, Anne Fadiman
The Dos and Don’ts of Cultural Appropriation
The Poet, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Problem With ‘Speaking as a …’
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
Whose Story (and Country) Is This?
You Don't Have To Be Crazy To Work Here, But It Helps, John Lovell (via This American Life, audio recording of reading, transcript here)
POEMS
Muzzle Magazine; Vital Signs: The Life of Poetry A blog series in which poets have been asked to write about poems that have mattered to them in some way—whether that way be through personal revelation, aesthetic inspiration, catharsis, or something else entirely.
A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades, June Jordan
CITIZEN, Claudia Rankine
Double Exposure, May Swenson
Haircut, Elizabeth Alexander
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, Hanif Abdurraqib
Howl, Allen Ginsberg
In The City, Chen Chen
I Sing The Body Electric, Walt Whitman
from Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, Dawn Lundy Martin
Lines Composed at 34 North Park Street, on Certain Memories of My White Grandmother Who nayyirah waheed https://www.instagram.com/nayyirah.waheed/?hl=en
Loved Me and Hated Black People Like Myself. July 15, 2017, Shane McCrae
Perhaps the World Ends Here, by Joy Harjo
real poem (personal statement), Rachel Zucker
Theme for English B, Langston Hughes
Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
We Should Make a Documentary About Spades, Terrance Hayes
What I Am, Terrance Hayes
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen
Why I Hate Raisins, by Natalie Diaz
VIDEOS
25 Mini-Films for Exploring Race, Bias and Identity With Students
A Conversation With Native Americans On Race
Arguments Against Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #20
Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive
I'm Not Racists, Joyner Lucas
Is Gender REAL? – 8-Bit Philosophy
Personal Identity - Philosophy Tube
Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #19
Personhood: Crash Course Philosophy #21
Real Life as a Young and Native American
Satirizing "code-switching" on screen
Situations, Claudia Rankine and John Lucas
The Disturbing History of the Suburbs
The Importance of Queer Allyship in the Classroom
The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes
Theorist Judith Butler Explains How Behavior Creates Gender: A Short Introduction to “Gender Performativity”
WATCH JUDITH BUTLER AND SUNAURA TAYLOR GO FOR A WALK, DECONSTRUCT IT.