Course info

Image:

White flowers against grass background.

Course Description: 

In this course, students will be introduced to a very particular sampling of coming of age narratives (bildungsroman). According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, bildungsroman means “’a novel of education’ or ‘a novel of formation’” and is a “class of novel that deals with the maturation process, with how and why the protagonist develops as he does, both morally and psychologically.” The bildungsroman or coming of age narrative has traditionally featured a male protagonist that successfully negotiates between individualism and a communal integration. In this course, the coming of age narratives will feature women writers of color. Aside from learning about different coming of age experiences, students will ponder how gender and race influence the bildungsroman genre. In addition, students, upon close

examination of the various writing styles employed by our various authors, will try their hand at experimenting with the various styles presented in constructing their own coming of age narratives.

 As part of the Explorations designation, this course also has the following objectives: to teach you how to become careful readers of literary texts and to teach you how to write confident arguments about them. Thus, it is both a close reading and an intensive writing course.

 Course Objectives

●       Students will demonstrate an understanding of the bildungsroman genre.

●       Students will learn the elements important to a women’s coming of age experience. 

●       Students will learn the elements important to a person of color’s coming of age experience.

●       Students will learn close reading techniques in order to become careful, readers of literary texts.

●       Students will learn how to effectively locate secondary peer-reviewed sources.

●       Students will learn how to effectively incorporate textual support and secondary sources.

●       Students will learn how to structure an effective, short analytic paper.

●       Students will demonstrate the ability to effectively use the grammatical and stylistic conventions of Dominant Academic/professional Discourse (DAD) in writing.

●       Students will produce their own coming of age pieces.

Required Texts:

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros. Published: 1984. 

Where We Once Belonged, Sia Figiel. Published: 1996.

Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward. Published: 2011.

The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka. Published: 2011.