LTA2010: African American Lit

LTA2010 African American Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course will introduce students to the African American literary tradition starting with the slave narrative and concluding with contemporary literary production. Along the way, we will consider the move from oral to written literatures, the aesthetic forms created and adapted by African American writers, and the role of African American letters in chronicling and shaping the experience of African American people. Our study will be informed by major historical moments —slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration from south to north, the Civil Rights and post-Civil rights eras—and we will read work by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)