COML 2150 - [Comparative American Literatures]

(crosslisted) AMST 2150
(LA-AS)

Spring. Next offered 2016-2017. 4 credits.

B. Maxwell.

Twentieth-century writing from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. A hemispheric American Studies perspective will encourage thinking about and across cultural, linguistic, and national demarcations. This course proposes taking seriously words from Africa, passed on by the novelist Paule Marshall: “Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.” Countering the literature of amnesia and baseless optimism, the works that we will read cannot forget, and decline to forgive, the historical traumas that so bitterly flavor them. Our concern largely will be with understanding the aesthetic strategies and innovations that these writers use to perform ceremonies not bent on reconciliation.