Conflicts and Resolutions
Romanus Muoneke

This seminar will focus on conflicts in people's lives as portrayed by writers from multicultural backgrounds. These conflicts are sometimes violent and sometimes purely psychological. This seminar will explore how the protagonists from selected texts confront common issues from different racial, social, religious, and gender backgrounds. While some of the texts are familiar, some are not, but our goal is to discover how they provide seeds for common ground.

Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
Molière, Tartuffe and A Doctor in Spite of Himself
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
Athol Fugard, "Master Harold"...and the boys

"Love in Many "Languages"
William Monroe

In this seminar we will explore love as it is figured forth in poems and a play, in novels and stories, written by authors from various ethnic and cultural communities. We may discover that what we call love is universal, or we may discover that love is culturally-constructed and various. Perhaps love is both, somehow local and universal at once. In any case, we will use the figuration of love--the potent combination of esteem and desire--as a starting point from which to compare and contrast the following works:

Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Walker Percy, The Second Coming
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Mark Doty, My Alexandria
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From
Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You
Lorenzo Thomas, Dancing on Main Street
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Literature as Healing Balm
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory

This seminar will include discussions of poems by African American, American Indian, Anglo American, Asian American, and Mexican American women writers. The poetry discussions will establish the "common ground" of these writers as well as celebrate the sites of difference. The poems will also serve as a springboard to discussions of the works of two provocative American playwrights: Tennessee Williams and Alice Childress. Memory and madness; seduction and betrayal; appearance and reality; connection and loneliness-these are some of the themes shared by these plays and poems. Seminar participants will be invited to perform poems and excerpts from plays as well as participate in discussions of film versions of selected works by Tennessee Williams.

Tennessee Williams:
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Vieux Carre

Alice Childress:
Trouble in Mind
Wedding Band
Wine in the Wilderness
Florence
Mojo