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Intro to African American Literature

ENGL 081.401
also offered as: AFRC 081
instructor(s):
MW 3:30-5:00

 

            This introduction to African American literature will begin with contemporary, groundbreaking texts such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.These twenty-first century texts will lead us to the questions about freedom, beauty, struggle, pleasure, and resistance that shape the origins of African American literature.

            The course will be shaped around circles of influence (not a linear mapping of a literary tradition). These circles of the “changing same” become the art of flow, layering, and rupture. We will dive into the multidirectional flow of “slave narratives/neo-slave narratives,” “black modernism/black postmodernism,” “black respectability politics/black radicalism,” and “mastery of form/deformation of mastery.”

fulfills requirements
Sector 2: Difference and Diaspora of the Standard Major
Sector 5: 19th Century Literature of the Standard Major
Sector 6: 20th Century Literature of the Standard Major
Cultural Diversity in the US of the College's General Education Curriculum