Ethnic Literature

Drawing on the cross-cultural insights of Ethnopoetics, this course explores familiar multicultural "themes" from an uncommon ground--constructivist notions of identity buttressed with knowledge of "authentic" sources. 

Students study several pre-Columbian and contact texts (Popol Vuh, Quetzalcoatl), as well as tradition oral poetry ("The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," Finding the Center: Zuni Tales and Yaqui Deer Songs) to begin to develop a sense of oral tradition, indigenous aesthetics and cosmology.  This equips students to read more contemporary poetry (Alurista's Floricanto)and classic fiction (Ceremony, Bless Me Ultima) and consider the complex ways in which tradition, myth, and ethnic identity inform contemporary writers self-consciously addressing ethnic identity.  With this grounding students can consider when and whether myths, identity, and tradition are lost, recovered, or invented.