UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
ENGL 347: American Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (AY 2023-24)
You have probably heard the names of American writers like Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass before. You may even have watched a few episodes of Dickinson on Apple TV+. The giants of Nineteenth-Century American literature and the issues that moved them still loom large in our imagination. But why? What has changed between then and now? What has stayed the same? What do contemporary writers gain from visiting and revisiting the past? To answer these questions, we will read classic works of American literature from the long nineteenth century alongside contemporary American literature that responds directly to those works, their themes, and concerns.
ENGL 375: American Literature (AY 2020-21)
In this survey of American literature from the late seventeenth century to the present we will focus on the fiction, essays, drama, and oral traditions that comprise the American literary experience. We will move chronologically and thematically. Using the Norton Anthology of American Literature and the print and online versions of Keywords for American Cultural Studies as our guides, this section of ENGL 375 introduces recurrent themes in the scope of American literature and culture. Keywords and themes for our course will include abolition, civilization, diaspora, environment, gender, identity, and race. We will end with a meditation on “normal”.
ENGL 446: Topics in Literatures and the Americas: Before Harlem: 19th Century African American Literature (AY 2018-19; AY 2019-20; AY 2023-2024)
“Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE!” urged activist and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnett in 1847 when he spoke to the Negro National Convention in 1843 and urged Black political leaders like Frederick Douglass to rise up against slavery. Echoes of such calls reverberate throughout African American literature and culture. In this course we will trace a long history of Black protest writing and responses to such calls for radical action. We focus on writers with a rebellious streak, like David Walker. Important essays like James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” will guide us at the outset even as we problematize the notion of “resistance” and its relationship to Black literature and culture.
ENGL 471: Topics in Modern/Contemporary American Lit I: Race, Sound and African American Literature (AY 2018-2019; AY 2019-2020)
This seminar focuses on the relationship between Sound Studies and African American literature. Sound Studies methodologies provide a way to chip away at privileged discourses of knowledge. Indeed, Josh Kun argues that “studying sound helps us put an ear to ‘the audio-racial imagination,’ which refers to the aurality of racial meanings, and to sound’s role in systems and institutions of racialization and racial formation within and across the borders of the United States.” Following Kun, we will investigate various recourses to sound throughout the African American literary tradition. We will read the work of literary figures like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry and alongside critics like Farah Jasmine Griffin and Alexander Weheliye. We will listen to everything. Traversing what Jennifer Stoever has termed “the sonic color line,” we will develop new understandings of black aesthetics, literature, and politics.
ENGL 471: Topics in Modern/Contemporary American Lit I: #BlackGirlMagic: Black Girlhood and African American Literature (AY 2021-22)
What is #BlackGirlMagic and how has it shaped Black literature? To answer these questions, we will investigate depictions of Black girlhood in Black literature and contextualize the rise of the field of Black Girlhood Studies by reading a diverse set of texts including but not limited to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970); Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982); Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019). We will analyze these texts using Black feminist methodologies as articulated by theorists like bell hooks, Hazel Carby, and Katherine McKittrick.
GRADUATE COURSES
ENGL 884: Topics in American Literature: Race, Sound & African American Literature (AY 2018-19; AY 2023-24)
This course serves as an introduction to the field of Sound Studies and an overview of recent works of African American cultural criticism. Graduate students who successfully complete this course should be able to:
• Identify and understand key issues germane to African American literary and cultural productions.
• Broadly define sound studies and understand its relationship to African American cultural productions from the nineteenth century to the present
• Undertake a close reading of various critical interpretations of African American literature.
• Develop critical work that engages with the field of Sound Studies and African American literary and cultural criticism
ENGL 884: Topics in American Literature: Reading Saidiyah Hartman (AY 2021-22)
In this course, we will read the work of Black cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman including Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton 2019); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007); and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press 1997). This course is offered at a moment in which the impact of Hartman’s work looms large. In a recent New Yorker magazine profile, writer Alexis Okeowo explains that Saidiya “occupies a singular position in contemporary culture: she is an academic, influenced by Michel Foucault, who has both received a MacArthur “genius” grant and appeared in a Jay-Z video.” Despite her celebrity status, Hartman’s scholarly work has shaped several fields including but not limited to Black feminist studies, African American Studies, Black Studies, Archival Studies and Performance Studies. By engaging with her writing and tracing its influence, students will be exposed to the key concepts and methodologies that energize contemporary Black Studies.
ENGL 815: Topics in Literary Study I: Performing Blackness: Black Drama and PerformanceTheory (AY 2020-21)
Zora Neale Hurston’s play Color Struck (1926), opens with a journey to a cakewalk competition in St.Augustine, Florida. Caught up in a debate around colourism, the main character John insists that “dancing is dancing no matter who is doing it.” But as John and his companions learn, for Black performers, the issues raised by dance and performance are almost always closely tied to race. To wit, Daphne Brooks reminds us that “in the context of an evolving African American literary tradition questing for existential meaning and an avenue to state with conviction that ‘I was born,’ a diverse array of political activists, stage performers, and writers utilized their work to interrogate the ironies of black identity formation.” In this course, we will closely examine the work of activists, stage performers, and writers who do just that. This course will provide students with an
opportunity to study foundational works of Black performance theory like Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent and E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity alongside Black performance art, drama, and television.
ENGL 884: Topics in American Literature: Race, Repertoire, Archive (AY 2019-20; AY 2023-24)
Black feminist scholar Jennifer L. Morgan has explained that “the archive carries “the force of law,” and through the conservation of documents and evidence it is situated at the intersection where change and stasis meet—it is both “revolutionary and traditional.” In this course, we will tarry a while at the juncture of change and stasis. We will attempt to mine the relationship between Black Studies, Black literary criticism, and the archive. We will take for granted that the history of the Black diaspora is written corporally and textually. How, then, do archival theories and practices supplement interdisciplinary modes of knowing and reading or illuminate issues like embodiment, performance, and representation? How have Black writers and theorists mined the archives, and what might we learn from them? To answer these questions, we will turn to the work of Michel-Rolph Troulliot, M. NourbeSe Philip, Saidyah Hartman, Robert Reid-Pharr, C. Riley Snorton, and others. We will speak to archivists and theorists whose work is informed by Black archival practices.
