Department of English

This survey course will explore the ways American writers utilize literary and cinematic texts as tools to theorize and debate notions of race in the late 19th and 20th Centuries. We will examine configurations of race in the Post-Reconstruction era alongside the influence of DuBois's notion of double consciousness, as well as the ways race is essential to formulations of American modernism. Writers to be considered in the course: Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. Writing for the course will consist of short papers and a final exam.