Course details

Name: ENGL - 238

Title: BLACK WRITERS IN THE UNITED STATES: A SURVEY

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2021

Credits: 3

Description:
This course is a survey of 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 texts with consideration of the history out of which these texts emerged.

More specifically, this course will require students to reflect on how literacy has often served as instruments of discrimination and 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.

Schedule: Monday,Thursday From 11:15 am To 12:30 pm

Graduation requirements:

• Genre Study (Fiction)
• Pre-1900 American (TE 1c)
• Other American (TE 1d)
• Post-1900 (1d)
• Ethnic Studies (3b)
• Class Issues (3d)
• World Cultures (TE 7a)

Teaching Faculty: Nicosia Laura (nicosiala)

Is course canceled: No