Fall 2018  |  ENGL 3597W Section 001: Introduction to African American Literature and Culture I (33755)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
4 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Meets With:
AFRO 3597W Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/04/2018 - 12/12/2018
Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 01:10PM
UMTC, East Bank
Hubert H Humphrey Center 184
Enrollment Status:
Closed (10 of 10 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
African American oral tradition, slave narrative, autobiography, poetry, essay, fiction, oratory, and drama, from colonial era through Harlem Renaissance.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?wrigh003+ENGL3597W+Fall2018
Class Description:
AFRO/ENGL 3597W African Americans are "America's metaphor," Richard Wright declared, posing both a riddle and a riff that together reverse conventional perspectives and intimate how we might discover in the shadows of American literary life our brightest mirrors. Following his lead, we will try to see ourselves--and the paradoxes and potentialities of our national experience--through the world of words and images conjured up over the past two centuries by African American writers. In AFRO/ENGL 3597W, we will employ a cornucopia of literary texts, oral traditions, audiovisual materials, and internet resources to bring the figures of black literary tradition out of the shadows and under an extended exploratory gaze. Understandably, African American literature evolved as a heavily "committed" tradition with both ancient African and Euro-American antecedents. Much of its mythological system and special "equipment for living" has been built on the communal base of the most elaborate vernacular tradition in American English--epic tales and legends, spirituals, blues, work songs, ballads, rhymed toasts, riddles, proverbs, jazz, jokes, and the rhetoric of rap music. During this first semester, our caravan will lead us forward from pre-modern Africa itself and the era of the earliest African American literary works; 18th and 19th century slave autobiographies, oral folk texts, abolitionist essays, orations and poems; on to the contemporary period of literature marked by burgeoning diversity and modernist innovation, by growing critical acclaim, and by the Jazz Age politico-aesthetic art movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Final Course Grade Components: 3 short essays;1/6th each; combined quizzes--1/6th; final paper;1/3rd (80% for the final draft of the paper itself, 20% for the preliminary thesis and full sentence outline submitted at the Research Paper Workshop)
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/33755/1189
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
30 June 2010

ClassInfo Links - Fall 2018 English Classes

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