'Se Habla Inglés': The Politics and Meaning of Orality and Text in Chicano/a & Nuyorican Spoken Word
ENGL 290
Spring 2009
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
AMST 255 |
Produced largely by working-class poets of color, contemporary spoken word, one of the most marginalized literary or cultural forms, has, nevertheless, acquired a certain caché, moving from the cafés, coffee shops, and tacquerias of its origins to pop-culture venues such as compacts disks, TV commercials, and HBO's Def Jam Poetry specials. In this course we will consider this emergent genre from a variety of perspectives, beginning with close readings of Chicana/o and Nuyorican spoken word texts as oral poetic forms and moving on to an investigation of the various possible historical antecedents of today's spoken world, which some trace to epic poetry or to Native American oral traditions or to the Beat Poets. |
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Essential Capabilities:
Interpretation, Writing
The students will develop their reading, writing, and interpretation capabilitiesthrough engagement with course texts as they read them, analyze them on their own and in seminar with classmates, as they write analyses of the texts, and as they read the texts against the political, economic, and social contexts from which/about which the texts were developed. Students will develop their information literacy skills doing research for individual oral presentations on histories of orality.
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Major Requirement for: None |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Written Texts - Course Packet including selections from:
Algarin, Miguel & Bob Holman (Eds). ALOUD: VOICES FROM THE NUYORICAN POETS CAFÉ. Henry Holt & Co: NY, 1994.
Cheng, Meling. IN OTHER LOS ANGELESES: MULTICENTRIC PERFORMANCE ART. UCP: Berkeley, 2002.
Eleveld, Mark (Ed). THE SPOKEN WORD REVOLUTION (SLAM, HIP HOP & THE POETRY OF A NEW GENERATION). Sourcebooks, Inc.: Naperville, IL, 2003.
Flores, Juan. FROM BOMBA TO HIP HOP: PUERTO RICAN CULTURE AND LATINO IDENTITY. Columbia UP: NY, 2000.
George, Nelson. HIP HOP AMERICA. Penguin Bks: NY, 1998.
Glazner, Gary Mex. POETRY SLAM: THE COMPETITIVE ART OF PERFORMANCE POETRY. Manic D P: SF, 2000.
Huerta, Jorge. CHICANO DRAMA: PERFORMANCE, SOCIETY AND MYTH. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 2000.
Medina, Tony and Louise Rivera (Eds). BUM RUSH THE PAGE: A DEF POETRY JAM. 3 Rivers P: NY, 2001.
Lipsitz, George. TIME PASSAGES: COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE. UMN P: Minn, 1990.
Ross, Andrew and Tricia Rose. MICROPHONE FIENDS: YOUTH MUSIC AND YOUTH CULTURE. Routledge: NY, 1994.
Simmons, Danny (Ed). RUSSELL SIMMONS DEF POETRY JAM ON BROADWAY. Atria Bks: NY, 2003.
Oral Texts include selections from the following CD's and DVD's:
Norte, Marisela. NORTE/WORD (CD, 1991)
Alfaro, Luis. DOWNTOWN (CD, 1986)
RAZA SPOKEN HERE and RAZA SPOKEN HERE 2 (Calaca Press CD's, collection of Chicana/o poets)
The Taco Shop Poets/José Montoya/Raúl Salinas. INTERSECTION (cd)
Rosario Sánchez, Elba and Olga Angelina Garcia Echeverria. WHEN SKIN PEELS (cd)
Seasons 1-3, HBO's DEF POETRY JAM (dvd).
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Examinations and Assignments:
Students will write 2-3 page weekly response/analysis papers. In addition, students will write one long (7-8 page) analytical paper focusing on one spoken word text as well as one long (7-8 page) essay reviewing the literature on the genre of spoken word in which they will also have to offer and justify their own definition of the genre of spoken word. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course meets the Literature of Difference requirement for the English major. |
| Instructor(s): Pritchard,Démian Times: .....F. 01:10PM-04:00PM; Location: FISK404; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 3 | JR major: 3 | | |
| Seats Available: 0 | GRAD: 0 | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 4 | FR: 3 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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