ENGL 259

Fall 2021 All Classes

All Classes

Early African American Literature and Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

An introduction to the study of early African American literary and cultural production, ranging from the earliest writings by African descended people in British North America in the eighteenth century to the end of World War I. At each turn, we will situate texts in their cultural and historical contexts, attending not only to the specificity of a particular text's moment, but also to the forces of contingency and tradition at play in the construction of literary, cultural, and political communities. Throughout our discussions we will think about both the "African-ness" and "American-ness" of African American literature as collective and imaginative processes. Early African Americans wrote for a variety of reasons—philosophical, political, pleasurable, instrumental—and protesting slavery and racism was just one (albeit an important one) among many of those reasons. We will read letters, poems, sermons, songs, constitutions and bylaws for religious and civic organizations, stories, and texts that defy easy categorization. Writers may include Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances E.W. Harper, William Wells Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Ida B. Wells.

Same as AFRO 259 and CWL 259. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Cultural Studies - US Minority

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ENGL 259 class schedule data for fall 2021
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	55608	Lecture-Discussion	M	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	259 English Building	Freeburg, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Cultural Studies - US Minority course. Credit: 3 hours Section Info: English 259 This course surveys African American literature from the neoclassical poetry of Phyllis Wheatley to the sociological essays of W.E.B. DuBois. From the American Revolution to the Abolitionist movement to the Civil War and beyond, African American writers have used their voices to protest against and imaginatively envision their conditions. In this course, we look at individual writers in their historical and political contexts, but also, we focus on the affective power of African American prose that arises from social reality of Black culture—spirituals, work songs, and storytelling. More importantly, the literary and sociopolitical appeal of African American literature from these early periods has been continuously drawn upon by social movements of the last fifty years. Thus, through close readings of writers like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Ida B. Wells in context, students in this course will come away with a solid background in early African American literature and culture as well as its myriad of influences on current discussions of social inequality in the U.S.