Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Considers how identity - construed psychologically, culturally, or socially - is performed and interrogated through literature and language. May be further organized by historical period, genre, or critical approach. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Particularly since 2012, Black American essayists, novelists, and perhaps most of all poets have forged what is widely considered the most powerful and formally innovative body of literature in contemporary North America.  However, just as the current period of racist backlash that helped spur that work is the result of more than four centuries of North American, European, and African history, the present literary boom grows from a literary history nearly as complex.  We’ll put it in that literary-historical context, with special attention to the emerging Black American critical concepts of “Black patience,” “Black time,” and “plantation modernity,” along with attendant attention to (among other dominant and emergent critical terms) Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, a “blues epistemology,” and other generic and critical constructs, to understand where we are and how we got here.  We’ll also ask some basic but difficult questions: what is, or was, African American literature?  How variously does such literature position itself in regional, national, and diasporic contexts?  Who’s the audience?  How much of one’s poetic, novelistic, or essayistic voice does one decide to bring from Black culture, how much from other wellsprings? 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: