Fall 2008
ENGL 371
Survey of Chicano/a Literature:
The Post Chicana/o Movement Novel
Crosslisted: SWGS 354/SPAN 396
Instructor: Aranda, Jose
TTH 9:25-10:40 (3 hour credit course)
Since the beginning of the new century, it has been clear that the corpus of Mexican American literature has expanded tremendously. Besides the writers of the Chicana/o Movement, the Recovery Project has introduced a whole cadre of authors whose inclusion in Chicana/o literary studies is in process. It is also clear that since the 1990s new writers of Mexican descent are being published in greater number by large and small presses, as well as on the internet. Because of this overall expansion, it is prudent to conceive of the literary archive of Mexican America as occupying three historical phases: Chicana/o Movement inspired literatures, pre-Chicana/o Movement literatures, and post-Chicana/o Movement. Of the three phases, the post-Movement era is the least understood and least examined. This course proposes to meditate on and theorize the differences and challenges (aesthetic, political, social) that contemporary literary cultural production presents to current tenets of Chicana/o literary criticism.
While this course will primarily focus on the above topic, we will do so with a healthy dose of history, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and gender analysis.
