Growing Up Ethnic: The Ethnic-American Bildungsroman

Catalog description

This course examines the Ethnic American Bildungsroman, broadly construed, in order to understand how America’s ethnic and racial diversity is expressed in literature and helps create a more inclusive national imaginary. We will study “coming-of-age” narratives by Native American, African American, Jewish American, Italian American, Asian American and/or Latinx writers, among others, and explore how their accounts of “growing up ethnic” broaden and challenge the boundaries of what constitutes representative U.S. literary voices.