2017-2018 Graduate Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 Graduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENGL 533 - Approach to Reading African-American Literature


Credit Hours: 3
Lecture Hours: 3
Lab Hours: 0

This course will explore formal modes, figurations, and traditions in African-American writings. The course will analyze ways in which African-American cultural codes produce and reproduce value and meaning. Primary focus includes vernacular theories, performance theories, “womanist” perspectives, and new historicism. The course will include culturally specific aspects of African- American writings and culture, showing how the black tradition has inscribed its own theories of rhetorical systems. The course will consider the slave narrative tradition as it is reflected in different periods by such writers as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison. A New Historicist approach to reading will give attention to how historical discourse displays the surrounding ideology. A consideration of the “black aesthetic” will emphasize the performance of African-American writings.


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