LIT 315 Gender and Race in Literature and Film

General

• Investigate how race and gender are presented, asserted, troped, and/or questioned in a variety of American narrative genres and contexts at a level consistent with the analytical and expressive complexity and sophistication that are distinctly characteristic of upper-division courses at comprehensive universities.
• Understand the historical and/or cultural development of race and gender tropes in literature and film at a level consistent with the analytical and expressive complexity and sophistication that are distinctly characteristic of upper-division courses at comprehensive universities.
• Analyze how expectations about race and gender shape our everyday lives at a level consistent with the analytical and expressive complexity and sophistication that are distinctly characteristic of upper-division courses at comprehensive universities.
• Critique representations of race and gender in literature and film as constructed or performed, and in relation to everyday life at, a level consistent with the analytical and expressive complexity and sophistication that are distinctly characteristic of upper-division courses at comprehensive universities.
• Understand and apply several theoretical lenses of race and gender to works of narrative art from American culture.
• Create independent analyses of American narrative genres (and the history of those art forms) from an intersectional perspective to investigate how our stories shape our systems of representing complexity/stereotype, privilege/disadvantage, discrimination/exaltation, in our artistic and societal values.
• Articulate personal and collective responses to racism and sexism across several modalities such as patterns of personal consumption, systemic control of the modes of production, and institutional rewards.
• Integrate textual and cinematic evidence into the student's own writing, using standard MLA formatting and citation practices, at a level consistent with the analytical and expressive complexity and sophistication that are distinctly characteristic of upper-division courses at comprehensive universities.