*** PLEASE STAY TUNED FOR ADJUSTMENTS TO SYLLABUS AND COURSE STRUCTURE! ***
"I REALLY DON'T CARE. DO U?" First Lady Melania Trump's decision to don a Zara jacket emblazoned with this combination of statement and question en route to a refugee detention center filled with unaccompanied children at the US-Mexican border generated heated discussion in the summer of 2018. As problematic as that fashion choice was, one can argue that the statement and question linger with us in regards to a variety of contemporary social challenges: crises of impelled immigration, climate change, and economic inequalities as well as enduring structures of racism and sexism. Why does the larger public seem to care so little about these issues? The query becomes yet more troubling when attention shifts to our own stances and responses. The others "DON'T REALLY CARE," but "DO U?"

One common explanation for this relative passivity is that current crises lack a mobilizing narrative. As Jonathan Safran Foer has recently written in regards to environmental changes, "planetary crisis hasn't proved to be a good story" (We Are the Weather 2019). Thus, we are not enraged, otherwise emotionally or intellectually engaged, or even interested.

In this seminar, we will be testing the ability of texts to get us interested, engaged, and invested in social problems by reading the activist literatures of two periods: narratives from the classical progressivist canon of the late nineteenth century that have ben credited not just with changing national conversations on social justice issues, but enacting concrete reforms, on the one hand, and texts drawn from the last ten years that have similar aimed to change national conversations and stimulate action, on the other. Specifically, we will be reading texts from both periods in tandem, looking at, for example, Ida B. Wells's indictment of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) in dialogue with Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015). Further pairings include Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) - Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) – Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals (2009), excerpts from Ida Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) – Noam Chomsky's "Occupy" (2011), and Sarah Grand's "The New Aspect of the Woman Question" (1894) – Chanel Miller's "Victim Impact Statement" (2016).

The course concludes with a day-long symposium on July 13th that will provide students in this seminar as well as Catrin Gersdorf's seminar on environmental activism the opportunity to interrogate literary mobilizations for social change in historical as well as contemporary examples.

While many of the historical texts are available in good online versions and we will also provide PDFs of shorter texts and excerpts, please purchase Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015), Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019), and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). All three of these books are good investments for your library. Feel free to purchase any reasonably priced edition.