David Haynes: Would You Like to See My Cat Mammy? Looking at Other People and their Stuff (January 2014)

Are you a white person who is just dying to include people of color in your next novel? Comfortably middle class and just fascinated as all get out with those quirky folks down at the trailer park? Does this course description make you a little bit queasy? Then this is the class for you! Haynes’s discussion class looks at how shifting lenses of creator/narrator/reader/viewer shape the development of and interpretation of cultural material in creative works. Among the texts discussed are works by Allan Gurganus’s White People, Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” and David Foster Wallace’s “Ticket to the Fair.”