LATINO LITERATURE: ON-LINE COURSE
Fall 2006 “Hispanic American / Latino Literature”
English 253
Professor John S. Christie

Two Sections:
ON-LINE (No scheduled campus classes)
On CAMPUS Capital Community College  950 Main St.  Hartford, Ct.  -  Monday and Wednesday Mornings: 8:30 -9:50am.

j.christie@comcast.net 
jchristie@ccc.commnet.edu  (860-906-5190)



Co-Editor of Latino Boom: An Anthology of US Latino Literature

Author of Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination

For more information on these texts and others on Latino Literature, visit
 Latino Stories

(To sign up or ask questions, see Capital Community College Distance Learning and WebVista)

Read the stories, poems and plays by US Latino writers. Explore the urban worlds of Puerto Rican Americans in Spanish Harlem, Dominican Americans between the island and New Jersey, Chicanos in the southwest, in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico and Cuban Americans divided between Cuba, New York and Miami.

This course meets gen-ed requirements for transfer to UCONN and CENTRAL CT STATE U. and works at Capital for the Humanities Elective requirement

Over the last twenty years, the stories, poems, novels and plays written by US Latino writers have become increasingly popular and much more important, not just in schools, and not just in the US, but throughout the world. It seems hard to believe that 20 years ago, writers like Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, and Rudolfo Anaya were unknown to mainstream readers. Now, Puerto Rican poets Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri have taken their place in the Latino literary canon, and Latino novels and plays have been adapted into films such as Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, and Josefina Lopez's Real Women Have Curves.  New writers arrive on the literary scene each month and the stories of Latino life in the US expand into every segment of our changing country.   

This course is an attempt to understand what happened, what changed, and what this body of literature is all about. We will read some poems, stories, essays and plays over the course of 15 weeks and talk about them in a variety ways on-line in our attempt to understand something of Latino art and culture. All the works were written in English and all the writers focus on what it means to be at least partly Latin-American within what José Martí (the great Cuban writer) called the "belly of the beast" or the United States. We'll explore literary influences from all of the Americas. We'll compare stories by Puerto Rican Americans and Dominican Americans, or poems by Chicanos and Cuban-Americans.

The course will be divided into five modules: each one tied to the five major chapters of the new anthology: Latino Boom: An Anthology of US Latino Literature which was in part designed developed to meet the needs of this class.

While we can only skim the surface of a vast and rapidly increasing body of literature, we can at least begin to understand what these creative writers say and feel about the Latino/a world in which they, and so many others, live. What are some of the "Latino" or "Hispanic" stories? What are the issues that confront each of the cultural groups lumped together under a misleading label like "Latino." How are the works crafted into something we call literature and why are they special? What are the Latino perspectives on race, prejudice, ethnicity, class, and gender that we all need to think about? We can't really answer the questions of course, but we can have fun exploring the language, the humor, and the creative imagination of some very talented artists.

How will it work:

  • The course will be connected to a web site at Capital Community College called the LatinoGuide which is designed to help students in researching Latino Literature. Hopefully your own work produced in the class will be published in these pages so that what you learn can help others.

Latino Guide

#Students' Guide to Latino Literature

  • The course will connect you to sites all over the web where students and teachers and even the writers themselves discuss these books.
  • We'll talk on-line about the works we read -- in informal ways -- and also through guided activities and exercises.
  • The grade for the course will be based on how well students demonstrate their understanding of what we read through participation and written assignments.