Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in American History and Literature

Course supervisor: David L. Robbins, PhD

Instructors: prof. David Robbins, PhD, Blanka Maderová, PhD, Mgr. Marcela Janíčková,

Recommended number of ECTS credits: 6

Class meets once a week for 2 hours (lecture and seminar).

Grading procedure:

Evaluation is based on 1 comparative essay on a topic discussed with an instructor (6 pages, spacing 1,5, font Times New Roman p.12).

Students are obliged to write a reaction paper based on the reading for each upcoming class.

Attendance:

Two absences are permitted. If you are absent more times, you will be asked to write a paper to make up for the class(es) missed.

Course Content:

1) Ideological foundations of American society I.

R.W. Emerson: "Circles"

excerpts from A. de Tocqueville: Democracy in America [1835 and 1840]

2) Ideological foundations of American society II. --

R.W. Emerson: "Spiritual Laws", "Politics"

excerpts from:

A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835 and 1840]

J. H. St. J. de Crevecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer [1782]

and from the work of J.F. Cooper and B. Franklin

3) Ideology of the self-made man and of the American dream

F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925]

excerpts from Autobiography of Frederick Douglass [1845]

4) Becoming "white American" - European ethnic immigration to the USA in the second half of the 19th century

excerpts from:

Mary Antin, The Promised Land [1912]

Jennifer L. Hochschield: Facing up to the American Dream [1995]

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White [1995]

5) Hispanic immigration

excerpts from Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987]

6) Early American feminist writing

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "The Solitude of Self" [1892]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Yellow Wallpaper" [1899]

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter Master and Slave [1807]

Stanton, Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention, Declarations and resolves [1848]

excerpts from Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845]

7) 20^th-century American feminism

excerpts from Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [1963]

excerpts from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble [1990]

8) Antebellum South, rhetorics employed to justify and oppose slavery and racism;

traditional, southern rendering of the Reconstruction that became the nation's interpretation in the early

20th ct

Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction[2006]

chapter 2: Forever Free

Kenneth M. Stampp: "The Tragic Legend of Reconstruction" in Reconstruction - An Anthology of

Revisionist Writings [1967]

9) Meanings of freedom for African Americans after the Civil War -- Presidential Reconstruction and achievements of Congressional Reconstruction

Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction[2006]

chapter 4: An American Crisis

chapter 5: The Tocsins of Freedom (with the exception of p. 134 , paragraph"In 1867 ..." to page 137,

paragraph "Hostile contemporaries ...")

10) The "Jim Crow" era as documented in contemporary black writers

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk[1903]

Cha 1: Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Cha 3: Of B.T. Washington and Others

excerpts from B.T. Washington: Up From Slavery [1901]

poetry of Paul Laurance Dunbar; excerpts from Marcus Garvey

11) 20^th-century African-American writers I

James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name [1949]

chapters: "Discovery What It Means to Be an American", "In Search of a Majority"

excerpts from Richard Wright, Native Son [1940] and Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man [1952]

poetry of Langston Hughes

12) 20^th-century African-American writers II

Alice Walker, The Color Purple [1982]

13) The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights, and Gay Rights Movements of the second half of the twentieth century; their various rhetorics and manifestations

M. L. King, "Black Power" in Where Do We Go From Here?" [1967]

Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet" [1964]

excerpts from Stokeley Carmichael, Eldredge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and gay liberation activists;

poetry by Maya Angelou