ENGH 350: African American Literature Through 1946

ENGH 350-001: African American Literature through 1946
(Spring 2021)

12:00 PM to 01:15 PM TR

Innovation Hall 207

Section Information for Spring 2021

This course will cover fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, and criticism 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 Du Boisean “double consciousness,” questions related to the politics of representing the “New Negro,” gender/sexuality, and red-letter extra-textual cultural/political events. Moreover, we will examine prominent literary and cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; black naturalism, realism, and proletarian literature of the 1930s and 1940s; and the emergence of a distinctly black modernist aesthetic/sensibility grounded in black expressive/vernacular forms such as folklore and the blues. Writers to be studied include Angelina Grimke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright.

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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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