Ethnic Literature in the United States - MA Seminar 1 3301-LAS1ŁU

This seminar explores American ethnic literature, with particular emphasis on African American and Latino/a writers. It examines key developments in the canon of American ethnic fiction and traces transformations within Jewish American, Native American, Asian American, Latino/a, and African American literary traditions. Authors studied include Philip Roth, N. Scott Momaday, Rudolfo Anaya, Maxine Hong Kingston, Julia Alvarez, John Edgar Wideman, Bharati Mukherjee, Jamaica Kincaid, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Díaz. Students are expected not only to engage closely with assigned texts but also to identify major thematic and formal concerns in ethnic writing and to analyze the defining features of multicultural American literature. Particular attention will be given to issues such as the search for new literary forms, autobiographical fiction and autofiction, the role of memory and tradition in shaping ethnic and racial identities, the possibilities and challenges of cross-cultural communication, and the trajectory of racial and ethnic essentialism.
The seminar also introduces students to key theoretical frameworks and critical approaches in ethnic studies. These include critiques of the Black Arts Movement and the Chicano and Native American Renaissance, as well as poststructuralist, feminist ethnic, and postcolonial criticism, alongside emerging perspectives in border studies and eco-criticism. Throughout, students will be encouraged to examine not only differences among ethnic traditions but also points of convergence, while avoiding reductive notions of universality that characterized much of early 20th-century American literary discourse.