Through four practical, hands-on units on Art History, students learn about four significant periods: Impressionism and its Aftermath, Cubism and Dada, Performance Art, and Conceptual Art. Students will create four art projects influenced by Pointillism, Collage, Performance Art, and Conceptual Art
This course introduces students to Mexican American literature from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Students explore the efflorescence of genes, including novels, plays, and poems, as well as the formal experiments by feminist writers involving journal entries, personal letters, and essays. Students study these works contextually--in relation to philosophy, the social sciences, and art history.
During the first half of the twentieth century, black writers debated about the role that literature should play in the development of African American culture. Should literary art aim for an idealized notion of beauty, they asked, or must it operate as propaganda to advance social justice? What role should African American literature play, and whom does it serve? These questions were connected to several others: Who produces this literature and culture? Does the top "talented tenth" percent of a population, as W.E.B. Du Bois argued? Or is it the "low-down folks, the so-called common element" praised by Langston Hughes? " Is there even such a thing as "Negro art," as George S. Schuyler truculently asked, or is skin color merely incidental to cultural production? Does a class analysis provide a necessary lens to the self-identification of black culture, as Richard Wright once argued? If so, should literature, therefore, depict the material conditions determining the lives of African Americans? Or, would the very depiction of these material conditions as “determining” be dangerous and ultimately self-hating, as James Baldwin contended? We will read the texts in which writers put forward answers to these questions. And, perhaps more importantly, we will read the literary texts in which these answers are dramatized and brought to life for us today.
Writing in 1947 about the American novel, the literary critic Lionel Trilling argued that "there never was a time when [the novel’s] particular activity was so much needed, was of so much practical, political, and social use—so much so that if its impulse does not respond to the need, we shall have reason to be sad not only over a waning form of art but also over our waning freedom.” This course takes Trilling's extreme claim—which connects the genre to a notion of freedom—as as a starting point to novels by Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, John Okada, and Jose Antonio Villarreal. Broadly, the course will consider the novel as a historical phenomenon and not as a mere synonym for “fiction.” We will study briefly the genre’s rise in popularity, along with the corresponding changes in economic and intellectual histories. More specifically, we will examine how our target novelists explored the possibility of individual freedom and mutual recognition at a time when their bodies would have been marked as other. We will study how their novels explore the limits and possibilities of idealized notions of self-determination free of social expectations
Dr. Arellano is an Associate Professor of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he has taught since 2019. From 2018 to 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Military Academy. Arellano has taught English Literature and Composition at various institutions, including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lewis University, and Triton Community College.
He has received the following awards for his teaching: