Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines literature and language within specific social, cultural, geographical, and textual environments to explore the mutually informing relationship between history and text. May be further organized by historical period, genre, or critical approach. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Slavery in Black and White

In Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin wrote, “I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.” Baldwin was only 31 when he said that. Already he was interested in how art can represent and reckon with the history of racial atrocity, and already he was calling out Black and White writers alike for their reticence to do so. Baldwin died in 1987, the same year Toni Morrison published her fifth novel. It was called Beloved, and it did what Baldwin had asked, arguably as skillfully as any fiction ever has.

In this course we’ll read Beloved and two other works of fiction that represent and reckon with the history of American slavery and its legacy: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2020). Each of these novels is about the past—Benito Cereno is set in the late-eighteenth century, Beloved in the mid-nineteenth, The Nickel Boys the mid-twentieth—but each is also about the era in which it was written, as well as about the future. While history will heavily inform our approach, we will focus on how writers use figurative language to accomplish the representation and reckoning Baldwin asked of literature.

Because in some U.S. states it’s actually illegal to assign these texts right now, and because a surprising number of libraries there are being forced to purge them, we’ll talk as well about the politics of literary representation in 2023. What happens when it’s illegal, even unsafe to teach and learn the history of the world’s oldest democracy in parts of that democracy? What effect does such censorship have on other societies, including Canada? After all, books are being banned here, too.

You need not have any knowledge of the assigned literature to do well in this course. You simply need to be prepared to do and discuss the reading, some of which is technically challenging and most of which necessarily treats difficult matters, including genocide, infanticide, trauma, and violence. You should also be prepared to attend both lectures and tutorials regularly. All course components will be conducted entirely in person and will not be recorded. Lecture slides will be posted online, but it will not be possible to recreate lecture from these slides alone.

If you have any questions at all about the course or course content, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at meverton@sfu.ca.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Our goals in this course are to help you (1) comprehend the mechanics of language and especially figurative language; (2) understand how that language reflects history and experience; (3) recognize complex relationships between text and context, especially the contexts of slavery and its legacy; (4) develop skills in analyzing and interpreting language and text, and learn strategies for creating and communicating informed claims about both; and (5) learn to use language, its history, and its capacities to engage with the ideas and experiences of others.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Print copies of the assigned novels, listed below, will be available at SFU Bookstore. You may use other editions, but it will make note-taking in lecture challenging given how frequently I’ll refer to textual language. You may of course also use digital editions. A heads up, though, about reading texts on cellphones: In my experience, doing so produces poor results. If you’re going to use digital texts, I recommend using a tablet or an e-reader. My recommendation, however Luddite it may sound: Stick with print because it better sticks to your brain.

In addition to the assigned novels, we’ll likely read short texts or excerpts by other writers, including Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Martin Luther King, Jr., Phillis Wheatley Peters, and Henry David Thoreau. Unlike the novels listed below, these shorter texts/excerpts will be available to download from our Canvas site.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: