2014 - Spring

Perspectives on Race and Class

Course Number: JOUR-GA 1281.002

Day & Time: Wednesday, 4:00-8:00pm

Location: 700

This seminar examines the ways in which some of the major writers of the 20th and early 21st-centuries have reported on the key and ever-controversial issues of race and class. We will look at how these issues have, historically, been written about, and at how some of today’s best reporters and essayists are approaching them; and we will explore how concepts of class and race have changed over the last century. Among the writers whose works we’ll study are W.E.B. Du Bois, James Agee, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Finnegan, Anthony Lewis., and Orlando Patterson. We’ll explore controversial issues such as affirmative action, the increasing polarization of wealth, and the legacy of slavery. This is an intensive reading course with a major final project.

CRC priority; others with permission of instructor.