ENGL 8200 is also offered in Spring 2025
ENGL 8200 is also offered in Spring 2022
Fall 2017 | ENGL 8200 Section 001: Seminar in American Literature -- African Americans in the Great Depression (34727)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 207A
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- American literary history. Sample topics: first American novels, film, contemporary short stories and poetry, American Renaissance, Cold War fiction, history of the book. Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?mills175+ENGL8200+Fall2017
- Class Description:
- This seminar will examine a range of African American political and cultural productions from the 1930s, with an eye toward 1) identifying the specific parameters and characteristics of the Depression era as a moment in African American cultural and political history; 2) tracing the ways Depression-era texts came to shape scholarly understandings of African American art, politics, and identity in general; and 3) using the context of the Depression to re-examine long-standing distinctions between and assumptions about various African American aesthetic and political projects. Texts studied will include Arna Bontemps' two historical novels about slave rebellions, which we'll read in part as precursors of the returns to slavery that have been thematically dominant in postmodern African American fiction; Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston's competing definitions of black folk identity and culture, and their dialogues with Communist and fascist discourses of the 1930s; Langston Hughes's oft-devalued pro-Communist protest poetry of the Depression decade; a range of theatrical adaptations, such as the Federal Theater Project's "voodoo" Macbeth and The Swing Mikado; and W.E.B. Du Bois's Marxist account of African American history in his landmark work of activist history, Black Reconstruction in America. Often lost between scholarly emphases on the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and the postwar ascendency and mainstream success of African American novelists, the Depression remains an uncertain period in African American literary, artistic, and political history. In this seminar, we'll try to better define that period and the continuing relevance black expression in the Depression holds for academic and sociopolitical projects today.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34727/1179
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 22 February 2017
ClassInfo Links - Fall 2017 English Classes