Course details

Name: ENGL - 238

Title: BLACK WRITERS IN THE UNITED STATES: A SURVEY

Section: 01

Semester: Fall - 2018

Credits: 3

Description:
This course is a survey of Anglophone writing in America by African and Afro-diasporic peoples that spans roughly the turn of the seventeenth century to the twenty first, and that focuses primarily on literature produced in the United States.

Students will be required to engage in analysis of textual phenomena alongside and with equal diligence as the history out of which these texts emerged. One foundational feature of this historical analysis will be a recognition of the historical contingency of genre—that is, the way that all conventions of expression and genre are blurred by and in the texts we read.

More specifically, this course will require students to reflect on how literacy and other generic proficiencies often served as instruments of discrimination and of oppression against Africans and African Americans throughout a majority of the United States’s existence. Throughout these readings, we will, at the same time, identify the sophisticated and inventive critical engagement with these conditions evident in the writings of black Americans, engagement that sometimes takes the form of direct critique, and at other times a speculative re-imagination of the status quo.

Authors may include Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gloria Naylor, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and the fragments and letters of run away slaves.

Last updated on 2018-04-09 By Schwartz Ana (schwartzan)

Schedule: Monday,Wednesday From 8:30 am To 9:45 am

Graduation requirements:

• Any Literature (1e)
• Other American (TE 1d)
• Post-1900 (1d)
• Ethnic Studies (3b)
• Women and Gender Studies (3c)
• World Cultures (TE 7a)

Teaching Faculty: Nicosia Laura (nicosiala)

Is course canceled: No