ENG 337 - African-American Writing, 1878-1945 (original) (raw)

Introduction to African American Literature

This is an intro class that mostly draws non-majors. Given that it's a ten-week class designed to cover the late-18th century through the 21st century, it can't do justice to most authors or eras. This particular selection and arrangement is designed to give students a sense of the variety among and debates between African American writers (rather than using a single author to represent each movement or moment). For example, students read a debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and later we read and discuss Richard Wright's and James Baldwin's disagreements about the protest novel. These sorts of debates and differences structure the course as a whole.

English 353 -- African American Literature to the Harlem Renaissance (Fall 2024)

2024

It is an intellectual and historical commonplace today that African American literature is central to an informed understanding of American literature and culture. Yet one persistent feature of misunderstanding about African American literature is that it arose relatively late in US history. This course emphasizes that the origins of African American literature lie in the eighteenth century, and that this literature echoed with many issues that have troubled the American republic since its foundation. Using recent scholarship and newly-available materials, the course traces out the transatlantic advent of African American literature in narratives and poetry. It later examines the post-Reconstruction use of the novel to dramatize and oppose white supremacism. The readings conclude with W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, and their perspectives on the problem of the 'color line' in the early twentieth century.

Black studies : pedagogy and revolution, a study of Afro-American studies and the liberal arts tradition through the discipline of Afro-American literature

1979

Black Studies: Pedagogy and Revolution A Study of Afro-American Studies and the Liberal Arts Tradition Through the Discipline of Afro-American Literature May 1979 Johnnella E. Butler, B.A., College of Our Lady of the Elms M.A.T., Johns Hopkins University, Ed.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Rudine Sims The Afro-American operates within the context of an Eastern/Western, African/Euro-American, Black/White sensibility that is simultaneously in concert with and diametrically opposed to the dominant Anglo-oriented American sensibility. The Western aspect of the warring sensibilities within the Afro-American experience maintains an oppression of the African sensibility by virtue of inherent contradictions between the sensibilities, and by virtue of colonial oppression. The duality, operating within the context of the dominant either/or sensibility, is exacerbated thereby maintaining a colonized state for the

The Past, Present, and Future of African American Literary History

2019

At a time when the project of literary history is eyed with increasing suspicion, two recent publications expand and complicate discussions of what constitutes the canon of African American literature: With their Cambridge History of African American Literature, Maryemma Graham and Jerry Ward have edited an impressive, comprehensive survey that will no doubt impact further discussions on the development of African American literature in the early 21st century. While its chapters offer a multiperspective view that defies any single narrative to explain 'AfAm Lit', Kenneth Warren, by asking the polemical question of What Was African American Literature?, tells quite a revisionary story: African American literature, Warren claims, was first and foremost a "representational and rhetorical strategy" (p. 9) in response to the social reality of the Jim Crow era, and therefore no longer exists. Particularly in conjunction with each other, these two publications might repre...

Black Literature for High School Students

The English Journal, 1979

An interracial team of:teacherS'" and regional consultanti worked together_reV#insthisten-syear-old book on the _ teaching of black literature. ne first section discusses black literature in terms of its discovery, tradition, and affective aspects; outlines goals and objectives for the course; presents a historical survey of black American writers; considers junior novels, short story collections, 'biographies, and, autobiographies (historical And moitern) by bot black and white writers; an0 presents supplementary bibliographies. of.black literature. The second part of .the bdok deals with classroom uses of black American 10ratUe.