Undergraduate Course: American Carnage: Riot Narratives in the United States (ENLI10402)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Spanning from the Great Depression to the era of Black Lives Matter, this course asks us to consider how the riot has been represented in American culture. Our aim is to analyse the political and aesthetic problems presented by the riot, which is often seen as so inarticulate and irrational as to defy representation. Drawing on critical theory that seeks to reframe the riot as a considered intervention in the economic sphere, we will analyse the literary strategies of a range of texts that attempt to negotiate these challenges and represent rioting collectives. This will involve analysing texts from a range of media (including film, drama and fiction) and genres that include autobiographical, experimental, literary, popular and young adult fictions. By reading fictional accounts of rioting that followed events such as the Rodney King trial and the 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Tavern, the course will also ask us to unpick the roles that class, race and sexuality play in the roots and representations of spontaneous urban uprisings. |
| Course description |
Riots are often seen as the political event horizon of collective action, the limit at which political rationality gives way to irrational mob violence. Yet American riots have frequently played a major role in key moments of the past century. Their presence has been felt across the Great Depression, the Civil Rights era and Stonewall to more recent rioting that responds to police violence and economic inequality. Indeed, as Joshua Clover has asserted, ours is an "age of riots".
This course places this problem at the centre of its analysis of American culture. How have different American cultural texts represented the riot? Have discourses of individualism overwritten accounts of the riot that see it as a collective political subject? Or does careful attention to literary form reveal more nuanced registrations of this riotous American multitude? This necessarily turns our attention to the riot's diverse cast of actors that includes workers, students, women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinx and queer subjects, whose rioting responds to various forms of social, political and economic discrimination. It also asks us to consider how the riot has been registered in different forms and genres. As such, the course syllabus ranges across a variety of texts that include film, drama and novels of various stripe (including literary, experimental, satirical, historical, crime, autobiographical, and young adult fictions).
Riots are deeply embedded in the economic sphere and students on this course will learn about the economic factors that structure the riot and their impact upon the riot's literary representation. Our aims are to critically analyse the ways in which different authors have narrated the complexities of these social, political and economic conflicts. Through our reading and discussion, we will critically consider: how do textual forms register the material reality of social inequality? How do different cultural forms give voice popular experience? Can collective movements be narrated or are political narratives limited by a focus on the individual subject? And, ultimately, are cultural texts effective forms of political protest?
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2021/22, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 11 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Other Study Hours 10,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
166 )
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| Additional Information (Learning and Teaching) |
one hour autonomous learning group
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Option course (20 credits)
Coursework Essay- 40% of final mark
Take-home final essay of no more than 3,000 words - 60% of final mark |
| Feedback |
Students will be provided with detailed written feedback on each element of assessment. Both prior to the submission of written assessment elements and after the release of written feedback, students are encouraged to attend office hours for oral feedback that will speak to their class participation and written work. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Construct arguments that evidence new understandings of the ways in which narrative texts negotiate the representational challenges of depicting collective subjects.
- Use new critical lenses that can analytically bridge the forms of American literature with its economic contexts.
- Critically interrogate a range of literary and historical sources to parse biases and offer evidence in support of complex arguments.
- Apply close reading skills to a wide range of genres and forms that spans the gamut of American literature, from literary experimental fiction to popular writing for young adults.
- Present self-directed research findings undertaken both individually and as part of a group and respond to similar research undertaken by colleagues.
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Reading List
Syllabus
The Day of the Locust (1939), Nathanael West (Novella)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck (Novel)
Little Scarlet (2004), Walter Mosley (Novel)
Detroit 67 (2013), Dominique Morisseau (Play)
Detroit (2016), dir. by Kathryn Bigelow (Film)
12th and Clairmount (2017), dir. by Brian Kaufman (Film)
The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), Edmund White (Novel)
The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Paul Beatty (Novel)
Dear Cyborgs (2017), Eugene Lim (Novel)
The Hate U Give (2017), Angie Thomas (Novel)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
As an outcome of having studied this course, students will develop a range of personal and professional skills commensurate with the range of SCQF Level 10 characteristics including:
Knowledge and understanding: students will have had the opportunity to demonstrate their critical understanding of a range of literatures and theoretical concepts and to relate their concerns and modes of expression to their cultural, political, social and critical contexts.
Applied Knowledge, Skills and Understanding: in their work for class discussion, presentations and formal assessment tasks,
students will have been able to practice the application of these theories and concepts in their construction of arguments about
the course material and to situate these arguments in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history.
Generic Cognitive Skills: in completing assessed essays and class presentations, students will have practiced identifying, designing,
conceptualising and analysing complex problems and issues germane to the discipline.
Communication: through participating in these tasks students will also have demonstrated the ability to communicate ideas and
information about specialised topics in the discipline to an informed audience of their peers and subject specialists.
Autonomy and Working with Others: students will also have shown the capacity to work autonomously and in small groups on
designated tasks, develop new thinking with their peers, and take responsibility for the reporting, analysis and defence of these
ideas to a larger group. |
| Keywords | American Literature,Contemporary Literature,Literature and Economics,Riots,Critical Theory,Marxism |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Sadek Kessous
Tel: (0131 6)50 3087
Email: sadek.kessous@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Sheila Strathdee
Tel: (0131 6)50 3619
Email: S.Strathdee@ed.ac.uk |
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