Well, we knew it was…

Well, we knew it was coming. I'm sick again, a bad hacking cough yesterday (though I felt otherwise okay), and today exhausted with a fuzzy head. Luckily I plan to just sit in the same chair all day and keep reading student packets, but I think I may actually write to them and tell them I may not finish until Monday night. If I feel too fuzzy-headed, I can't do good critique for them, so it's doing no service to try to finish on time, just for the sake of being prompt.

I would blame it on pushing myself too hard, except that Kevin's sick too, and he's been a lazy bum lately. So I think it's just the gods of disease at fault. Mean gods.

Did finish my syllabus yesterday. I may continue to tweak it some, but here's the reading list so far, in case you're curious. I decided that instead of trying to give all the different identities equal time (a futile task in any case), we'd do two in some depth, and then just glance over some of the other possibilities; hopefully that'll put students in a position to further investigate the ones that interest them (if any do :-). I don't necessarily agree with or love all of these essays; some of them are here just to give students some sense of opposing viewpoints. The question of which ones I love is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

The Oates is The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. ER means electronic reserve. Sorry I can't make the formatting prettier -- too tired:

Unit One: Identifying Our Identities

Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (Oates)

Unit Two: Race and Ethnicity

Daniel C. Dennett, "The Mythical Threat of Genetic Determinism," Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2004 (ER)
"Upstream: Issues: The Bell Curve" (3-5 articles)
(http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/index.html)
Francis S. Collins, "What we do and don't know about 'race', 'ethnicity', genetics and health at the dawn of the genome era"
(http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1436.html)

Richard Wright, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" (Oates)
N. Scott Momaday, "The Way to Rainy Mountain" (Oates)

Gloria Anzalda, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," Borderland/La Frontera (ER)
Allan DeSouza, "Stories to Read Aloud: No VI," On a Bed of Rice (ER)
Leonard Michaels, "My Yiddish," Best American Essays: 2004 (ER)

Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (Oates)
"Upstream: Issues: Affirmative Action" (3-5 articles)
(http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/affact/index.html)

Unit Three: Gender

Jane Bryant Quinn, "Revisiting the Mommy Track"
(http://www.lovegevity.com/parenting/parentingadvice/mommytrack.html)
Susan Estrich, "In the Middle of a Revolution," Sex and Power (ER)
Virginia Valian, "Gender Schemas at Work," Why So Slow? (ER)

Maxine Hong Kingston, "No Name Woman" (Oates)
Adrienne Rich, "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" (Oates)
Joanna Russ, "When It Changed" (http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/russ/russ1.html)

John Kessel, "Stories for Men" (http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0401/Men.shtml)
John Updike, "The Disposable Rocket" (Oates)

Joanna Russ, "What Can A Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write," To Write Like a Woman (ER)
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Welcome to Cancerland," Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2002 (ER)
James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See" (http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/tiptree2/tiptree21.html)

Unit Four: Other Identities

Carol Queen, "The Queer in Me," Real Live Nude Girl (ER)
Wayne Koestenbaum, "My 80s," Best American Essays: 2004 (ER)
Dorothy Allison, "A Question of Class," Skin (ER)

Jeffrey M. Friedman, "A War on Obesity, Not the Obese," Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2004 (ER)
Benedict Anderson, "Introduction," Imagined Communities (ER)