ENG 387: SURVEY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course will familiarize students with canonical writers in the African American literary tradition, while at the same time examining how particular genres, themes and events simultaneously resurface and change throughout African American literary history. We will explore how African American writers have challenged themselves and each other to examine what it means to be "American" at different historical and political moments, and how these identities are complicated by issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. We will focus throughout on literature as a site where struggles over self-representation, identity, citizenship, and freedom take place.