CRWT 40.05 Engaging Hybridity: Race, Gender, Genre

This course explores hybrid genres such as the prose poem, the lyric essay, and the graphic memoir, as well as other sites of artistic production that involve intersection, exchange, conflict, inhabitance, resistance, and cultural address. Students will consider the diverse and provocative creative work of Mat Johnson (Incognegro), Maggie Nelson (Bluets), Sebastian Matthews (Beginner's Guide to A Head On Collision), Claudia Rankine (Citizen), Tyehimba Jess (Olio), Kwame Dawes (Duppy Conqueror), A. Van Jordan (The Cineaste) and Dee Matthews (Simulacra), and based on these readings they will develop their own creative work in hybrid genres. The class will utilize both seminar and workshop formats, but the emphasis will be on the practice of writing as a way of thinking through forms of social, political and cultural engagement with this anxious moment in history, and of asking what kind of parameters, if any, art, particularly literature, truly requires? Are they porous enough? And what role does identity play in the choice to cross such borders?

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:ART

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.

Department-Specific Course Categories

Course Group III