AML 2070.0541 Assignments
4/1-4/22/03 (Weeks 13-16)


Assignments can be updated at needs/speed of the class; you will be notified of updates by e-mail, and are responsible for checking the page after notification.
Reading quizzes can and will occur at any time during the course. Listserve assignments/topics will be e-mailed as necessary.
»»WEEK 13 (4/1 & 4/3/03) -- for this week, have read most of Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban.

E-mail assignment #7 (Due by midnight of MONDAY 7 April):(200-300 words, and no padding, waffling, or b.s.ing) respond to any one of the topics listed below. Send to my own e-mail, nickym@melczarek.net, with the subject line of your last name and Response #5. In your response, indicate to which topic you respond, by number.

1) U.S.-born students may find the attitudes toward the U.S. expressed by various characters unusual. This strangeness often results from the particular way in which "Cuba" has been presented to U.S. students in their history classes. Yet any country's view of another country is the result of several factors: how another country presents itself, or gets presented, through its media or its own propaganda; how one's own country represents other countries through media and internal propaganda. It's often too easy to say that some novels "show" the countries they discuss, or that we "learn" about other countries through novels. Such statements overlook that novels, no matter how "reality-based" they may be, are nonetheless creative fictions. What kinds of "America" or "Cuba" do we therefore get in Dreaming in Cuban? How much of "Cuba" do we see as the creation of U.S. opinion? and how much of "America" do we see as the creation of Cuban opinion?
2) As in The Crying of Lot 49 and Ceremony, the characters in Dreaming in Cuban experience history very personally. We might say that the personal is the field on which history plays itself out. How would you describe or explain the ways in which U.S., Cuban, and Cuban-American histories play themselves out on the individual lives of Garcia's characters?
3) The narrative of Silko's Ceremony was interspersed with verse sections. Similarly, Dreaming in Cuban alternates between narrative sections and Celia's letters from 1935-1959. What is the effect of the insertion of these letters that are both remnants from the past and also very personal writings from Celia to Gustavo?

»»WEEK 14 (4/8 & 4/10/03)
»»WEEK 15 (4/14-4/15/03) -- conference week
»»WEEK 16 (4/22/03)
»»PAPER #2 DUE IN MY MAILBOX BY TUESDAY 29 APRIL BY 4 P.M.
If you wish your paper returned to you with your final grade assessment before summer, include a self-addressed, stamped legal envelope with at least $1.50 postage already affixed to the envelope. The envelope should be one of those manilla ones used to send papers without folding them. If you do not include an envelope, you will have to make special arangements with me to retrieve your paper otherwise -- this is my final semester at UF, and I will not be on campus in the fall to return your papers.
»» Links: AML 2070.0541 Mainpage