CORE 002 SC - Becoming Someone Else in American Culture

American literary and cultural history is full of discarded selves. In a culture that celebrates both self-creation and especially, self re-creation, what happens to those selves we leave behind? Are they ever jettisoned fully? Do they conflict with our new selves? Ranging from the Colonial period through the 21st century, the course will take up a variety of acts of self-fashioning, self-transformation, and self-forgetting in order to explore questions of personal, racial, gender, and national identity. We will examine how writers, artists, and musicians explore the fluidity of these categories, as well as the social consequences that attend transgressing them.

Course Credit: 1.0

Please refer to the course schedule on the Scripps Portal for current course offerings and details.