ENGH 350: African American Literature Through 1946

ENGH 350-001: African American Literature, 1903-1946
(Spring 2019)

12:00 PM to 01:15 PM MW

Thompson Hall 1017

Section Information for Spring 2019

This course will cover fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, by and about African American authors from 1903 to the middle of the twentieth century.  The class will investigate several thematic, formal, ideological, critical, and theoretical issues, including the formation of a distinctive post-reconstruction African-American subjectivity, the manifestations and implications of DuBois's key theoretical concepts (e.g., “double consciousness,” "Talented Tenth"), questions related to the politics of representing the “New Negro," the ways in which black women embraced and contested the era's prevailing "respectability politics," and how gender nonconformists and sexual minorities sought vehicles for self expression in the so-called "jazz age."  In addition, we will examine prominent literary and cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the impact of Caribbean and African cultures on African American literary expression; and the emergence of a distinctly black modernist aesthetic/sensibility grounded in black expressive, vernacular, and musical forms such as folklore and the blues. Authors to be examined include: James Weldon Johnson, Angelina Grimke, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston.

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Focusing on fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography, explores evolution of African American literature and aesthetics and major social, cultural, and historical movements such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and emergence of black naturalism, realism, and modernism in the 1930s-40s. Major authors include Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Margaret Walker, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. Limited to three attempts.
Recommended Prerequisite: Satisfaction of University requirements in 100-level English and in Mason Core literature.
Schedule Type: Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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