An English professor is offering a course called Latinx Literature this semester that will examine Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Dominican American, Cuban American and U.S. Central American authors.
Jennifer Dix, who has taught at AACC for 17 years, will lead the three-credit class to help students deeply understand the works by analyzing their literary, historical and political concepts.
The class will benefit students in “a lot of different ways,” Dix said. “One, just learning to read critically and write analytically about literature is an incredibly important skill in and of itself, but I’m hoping that people will get exposure to works that they haven’t encountered in their other classes.”
The professor said “a lot of things” inspired her to offer the new in-person course.
“There are so many just really powerful and amazing works,” Dix said. Without a Latinx literature course, “there was just a gap in our current English curriculum.”
Narrowing down the list of potential authors to include in the course was a challenge, Dix said.
“I’m trying to represent multiple communities and, I mean, you could teach a class just on Puerto Rican literature, in and of itself,” Dix said. “So then trying to find one work to convey the richness of that can be really challenging.”
Dix, who double majored in English and Spanish in college, added: “I started with a theme of transformation, and then tried to think about all the different ways that things can be transformed. Whether that’s a political transformation, immigration or migration, personal transformation in the way someone sees the world. … Then I just started thinking about books that I had read recently that would fit into.”
The 15-week class will run Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. in Humanities 100.