Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines selected works of American literature in a variety of genres, organized by cultural movements, critical issues, theoretical approaches, or historical periods. May include works in various media, and explore relations between American and other national or regional literatures.

COURSE DETAILS:

Contemporary African American Poetry, Black Time, and that Longue Durée

Much of the most powerful contemporary North American poetry has come from African American poets engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement.  Because most Canadians, unlike English majors in the U.S. and elsewhere, receive little if any undergraduate training in African American literature, we’ll spend the first four or five weeks on an introductory, anthology-style overview of the African American poetic tradition, from Phillis Wheatley on through the New Negro Renaissance, the Civil Rights era, the Black Arts and adjacent movements, and the 80s-early 00s (Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey) before focusing on the efflorescence of brilliant present-day poetry.  We’ll place this recent work in the context of longstanding questions of what African American poetry should be: the role of vernacular and dialect vs. “standard” American English; the use of jazz, blues, and hip hop rhythms and syncopations vs. “standard” meters; postcolonially-inflected questions of purity and hybridity; the remarkable reappropriation, even domination, of the sonnet—of all things!—in both Claude McKay and several contemporary poets; antitheses and syntheses among folk, regional, national, and cosmopolitan/diasporic visions of African American identity; and questions of audience.  One theoretical lens we’ll likely use is the emerging set of critical discourses around plantation modernity, black time, and black patience.  Finally, we’ll think about what the African American tradition and present moment might have to say to and for the politically-engaged Canadian poetry and poetics with which SFU has long been associated.

 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: