English 3387-004 (African American Literature) with Dr. Michael Borshuk will examine the development of African American literature from the slave narratives of the nineteenth century to postmodern fiction at the turn of the twenty-first. We will begin with a discussion of critical approaches to African American literature, and then proceed chronologically through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among our topics for interrogation and discussion will be: the influence of oral and musical traditions on the development of African American writing; the intervention(s) into traditional constructions of the American canon that black literature inaugurates; the ways that African American writers redress stereotypes and problematic representations of black Americans; and the “alternative” histories that African American literature proposes alongside America’s dominant historical records.
