–Announcements—
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–Deadlines–
END OF SEMESTER DUE DATES
[Note: For Blog posts: Please, check all appropriate category boxes (esp. Group name and final project)]
Friday, May 6th at midnight
Each group should post the time/date/place/and specific audience for their project. I am looking for confirmed details. So if you need a room on campus, you should be telling me which room. (If you didn’t post this yesterday, do it today.)
Tuesday, May 10th by 2:30 pm
Group E presentations and history paper due (please also submit an electronic copy).
Tuesday, May 10th by 10 am
Someone from each group should via post provide a list of all the materials needed for your project (i.e. a video, a poem, tape, paper, a brochure). If you have to make materials (i.e. a survey), then you should also submit a draft of at least half of all the materials you need to make. (i.e. if you have two materials to make, you submit one draft. If you have only one, you should submit a draft of at least half of that material.)
Thursday, May 12th by 4:30 pm
Someone from each group should post a revised lesson plan. The revised lesson plan should contain:
a) the what – 2-4 sentences describing what you’re doing in general
b) your main teaching objective. (By the end of this lesson students will be able to ____. OR The main objective of this lesson is to _____ students (about) ___________.)
c)list of your materials
d) a step by step action plan (with at least ten steps). You should also include the name(s) of each group member responsible for each step.
Tuesday, May 17th (in class)
Final Project Presentations (informal, but you should be there, and there should be some visual or audio you can share with the class.)
Tuesday, May 17th (in class)
extra credit evaluations in class
Tuesday, May 17th (in class)
Group E Monster Papers Due (hard copy in class and electronic version.)
Thursday May 19th by 8 pm
Deadline for Group E members to request a chance to revise.
Saturday, May 21st at 8:00 am
Final Project Write Ups and Visual/Audio Documentation Due.
Sunday May, 22nd at 8:00 am
Final Project self/group reflection and evaluation form due.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
When S.E. Hinton published The Outsiders in 1967, she was 15 years old. The novel was a ground breaking portrayal of youth society. By the late 1960s, even as young people rebelled against conformity and protested war, racism, sexism, and other inequalities, mainstream America largely believed that
childhood was a protected and natural state of innocence. When Hinton’s novel portrayed gangs, violence, ruthless social organization, and real difficulties in coming of age, she left an indelible impression on American readers and the publishing industry which recognized these themes as particularly popular (read marketable) with young and older readers alike. Though Hinton’s age was seen as essential to her perspective, what we now call young adult literature has little to do with the age or perspective of the actual writer. Instead, driven largely by market demands to reproduce a sensational product, YA literature names an adult intent to reach an audience that is other than itself. It announces a culture’s desire to educate, entertain, but most of all to imagine and define the other (not adult) reader.
In this course, we will return to the idea of the outsider and literature that can be called “young adult” literature not because it targets young adult readers but because it is working from within a young adult experience. Focusing on both texts written by young authors and highly autobiographic texts meant to communicate something of the author’s young adulthood, we will examine how these texts negotiate the concepts: “young” and “adult.” Paying particular attention to the idea of the monstrous teenager and the normal adult, we will ask: What exactly is “adult”? How do ideas of “adult” and “youth” get pitted against each other? And what is the relationship between “adult” and ideas of blackness, femininity, queerness, and other qualities that have often been associated with childishness? Ultimately we will try to understand how youn
g adult literature both helps clarify the limits of the category adult and the possibilities of being near but still outside that designation.
Shortly after I wrote the initial course description, the grand jury verdict came back for Officer Darren Wilson and the “Black Lives Matter” movement exploded. It is not that I had not been thinking about what makes the black teenage boy so monstrous in an American (already read white) imagination. Certainly I’ve been very focused on this question at least since Trayvon Martin’s death, and in less articulate ways since I was myself a teenager. But as I saw that the notion of monster along with ideas of gender, race, and class were prevalent themes in the texts I chose, I decided we would be remiss if we didn’t think about these texts and the ideas around them within the light of both history and the contemporary moment. I have given the title of the course a sub title, “A Hood Project.” The hope is that we will think of the discussions and work we do in this class as more than school work but also as an ongoing and necessary project that has begun before us and will continue after this class. Still by the end of this course I hope we in particular will have found different ways to think in and beyond the classroom about the relationship between adolescence and blackness. I hope that we can write about both the problems and also the radical possibilities of those young people we call (explicitly or otherwise) monsters: that is to say of juvenile delinquents, hoods, freaks, and outsiders. The title hood project is a play on words. It is a play between between the idea of a neighborhood (a delineated geographically delineated physical space that binds a group of people), a hood (or a hoodlum), and childhood and adulthood (as temporal and developmental neighborhoods). Adolescences, Teenage, Young Adult, Youth all become ways of talking about the liminal (in between) space between these two hoods.
Required texts
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus* by Mary Shelley*
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
American Born Chinese by Gene Leun Yang
A Lesson Before Dying by Earnest Gaines
Monster by Walter Dean Myers
Additional readings posted online in the syllabus or emailed as attachments to students.
*may be acquired for free online, with kindle or ibooks