Undergraduate Courses
E 422 African-American Literature
Prerequisite: One course in literature
We will treat the literature in this course as its own tradition—with its own themes, preoccupations, ways of “making meaning”, and ways of negotiating the dominant “American” culture (and literature). This does not mean that these writers are not “American” writers; they are and any understanding of American literature needs to include the writers we will treat in this class. But it does mean that these writers thought of themselves as a part of a distinct tradition—as a part of a legacy of writing and protest that (in my reading) becomes self-conscious with Frederick Douglass. As we will see, writers following Douglass have responded in ways both subtle and explicit to Douglass and each other—disputing theories of racism and forms of resistance to oppression, retrieving unconscious assumptions about gender and class that lie behind certain ideas of what it means to be “black,” and returning to certain favorite folk tales and metaphors. The differences we will find in our reading of the different works of the course will testify not just to the differing perspectives of the authors, but also to the different historical contexts within which they wrote. Writers will include Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison.
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