Heather Hathaway

Marquette University

Introduction to African American Literature

OBJECTIVES:
The purpose of this course is twofold. First, it is simply to acquaint students with a variety of classic texts, writers, and themes that have fundamentally shaped what might be called the African American literary tradition. Second, it is to introduce critical questions and paradigms that are central to the discipline of African American letters in order that students may then apply these to future reading. I have linked texts along the following categories:
- the influence of folk elements (storytelling) and music (spirituals, blues, work songs & gospels) on the development of the tradition
- the resonance of trickster and masking techniques as mechanisms of survival
- quests for freedom and literacy and related movement from South to North
- the complexity of audience address and the choice of language use within that context (dialect, formal, and Black English)
- the debates surrounding form versus content, protest versus affirmation
- the subject of dual consciousness
Lecture Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (chps. 1-3)


SCHEDULE:
Week 5: Post-Emancipation Resonances and Debates

  • W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

    Week 6:

  • Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
  • Dudley Randall, Booker T. and W.E.B.

    Week 7: Of What Use is Fiction?

  • Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces Carby, Chps. 4, 5, 6

    Week 8: The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance

  • Alain Locke, The New Negro
  • James Weldon Johnson, Introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry
  • Selections of Poetry and short fiction by Cullen, McKay, Toomer, Hughes

    Week 9:

  • Jean Toomer, Cane

    Week 10: Legacies: Politics, Protest, Folkways, Friendship

  • Richard Wright, Black Boy
  • Wright, Blueprint for Negro Writing
  • James Baldwin, Many Thousands Gone in Notes of a Native Son

    Week 11:

  • Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • June Jordan, Toward A Black
  • Balancing of Love and Hatred in Civil Wars

    Week 12: That Hyphenated Space between African and American

  • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
  • Ellison, Richard Wrights Blues and
  • The World and the Jug

    Week 13:

  • Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
  • All Gods Chillun Got Wings
  • Ellison, Flying Home
  • Robert Hayden, Deadalus Fly Away Home

    This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.


    CEPACS