EN 227--Introduction to African American Literature
Professor Mason Stokes, English Department, Skidmore College
This course will survey African American literature from the 1700s to the present.
Beginning with Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, we will examine
the uneasy relationship between "race" and writing, with a particular
focus on how representations of gender and sexuality participate in a
literary construction of race. Though this course is a survey of African
American literary self-representations, we will keep in mind how these
representations respond to and interact with the "majority culture's"
efforts to define race in a different set of terms. We will focus throughout
on literature as a site where this struggle over definition takes place--where
African American writers have reappropriated and revised words and ideas
that had been used to exclude them from both American literary history
and America itself. Our text will be the Norton Anthology of African
American Literature. Assignments include two shorter essays, one longer
essay, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
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