English 3392: African American Literature
(African American Literature from the 19th Century to the Present)
Dr. Michael Borshuk
This course 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.
Tentative Reading List:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A. Smith, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3rd Edition
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [complete text is in Norton]
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Nella Larsen, Passing [complete text is in Norton]
Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
