Mar 29, 2024  
Catalogue 2018-2019 
    
Catalogue 2018-2019 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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AMST 387 - On Campus


1 unit(s)
This course is designed as a literary and cultural investigation of academic life in the US. Taking a long historical view we will read some examples of what is called “the campus novel”: Mary McCarthy’s The Group, John Williams’s Stoner, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. We will also discuss a wide range of essays, extending from memoir to cultural critique, addressing the language of campus life and its politics. Here are a few examples: Laurel Johnson Black on a working-class student at an elite institution; Louis Menand on the humanities revolution; Elizabeth Armstrong on parties on campuses; Lisa Wade on gender and hookup culture; the public letter addressed to Brock Turner by the woman he raped on Stanford campus; Laura Kipnis on Title IX cases; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the Mecca” that was Howard University; Claudia Rankine on daily conversations mined with hidden violence; Hua Hsu on “civility wars”; and, of course, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on the food in Vassar dining. This is an exploratory course and my hopes are that each one of you will bring more to it than is already there, and take the conversation in new directions. Amitava Kumar.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2018/19.



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