Academic Stories: Public Knowledge, Identity, and the State of the Humanities
- Winter 2014
Additional Details:
The academy has long been imagined as a place where people create public knowledge, as well as shape their identity. If many college students hope not only to learn a trade but “find themselves,” what does this process look like based on who you are and how your life intersects with history, culture, politics, gender, sexuality, race, privilege and other axes of social life? This course uses academic memoirs, academic biographies, and campus fiction to explore the humanities as an intellectual and institutional formation, and our own particular place in it. Our readings, films, and class discussions will focus on the public and private aspects of our academic lives, and encourage us to reconsider how we read, write, and narrate our own academic stories.
Japanese By Spring—Ishmael Reed
Penguin Books; Reprint edition (August 1, 1996)
ISBN-10: 0140255850
Out of Place—Edward Said
Vintage; F First Paperback Edition Used edition (September 12, 2000)
ISBN-10: 0679730672
White Noise—Don DeLillo
Penguin Classics; Anv Dlx edition (December 29, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0143105981
A Life in School: what the teacher learned—Jane Tompkins
Perseus Books; Third Edition edition (December 20, 1996)
ISBN-10: 0201327996
Black Ice—Lorene Cary
Vintage; First Edition edition (February 4, 1992)
ISBN-10: 0679737456
Moo—Jane Smiley
Anchor; Reprint edition (February 24, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0307472760