Dr. Laura C. Jarmon

University of Tennessee at Martin

English 345/545 Black Writers in America 3 credits Wednesday 3 - 5:50

TEXT

Gates, Jr., Henry, Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1997.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course focuses upon selected African American authors and their work. Especially, the course has the goal of acclimating students to major genres and arguments representing the development of black American literature. Early genres such as autobiography via the slave narrative and later genres such as the novel both impute literary art as a problematic for both the artist and the critic. The works and controversies about the status of black art mirror the growth of African American voice and presence. The course includes literary art and critical theory spanning the period from slavery to the present, as represented in selected works.

COURSE PURPOSE, GOAL, AND OBJECTIVES

This course focuses on works by African American writers. Study of such writers yields a more accurate view of the scope of American literature and propensity for a more knowledgable critical assessment of mainstream American literature. The intent of the course is to increase the student's awareness of the aesthetic properties of African American literary works. This course seeks to place in the curriculum a program of study intended to respond to the students’ need for a more rounded perspective of America’s multiethnic character. The course has as its goal intensive study and appreciation of the works constituting this literature; by appreciation it is meant that students will learn and apply a set of standards appropriate to evaluating major and minor literary works in the corpus. Besides reading selected literary works, students will learn applicable research methods for identifying and assessing this category of literature. Objectives of the Course--The course seeks to: introduce students to the major and minor works in African American literature; increase the students’ recognition of the scope of American literature, adding to this scope the dimension represented by African American works; enable students to express informed opinions of the literary value of works in the corpus of African American literature; and enable students to conceptualize means by which African American literature explores and is informed by conventionally non-literary ideas and processes. Course Concepts--recognition of marginalization and the proper disposition of African American literature within a context of mainstream American literature; the capacity for open dialogue on a literary corpus outside the mainstream of American literature; effective and principled scholarship; a awareness of written and oral persuasive practices; literacy relative to American multiculturalism; awareness of interaction among disciplines as means of interpreting with a sense of fine levels of distinction.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Activities Required of Students--Read selected literary works and criticism; Research and write scholarly essays; Oral presentation of a paper [essay], in class; Possible field/interview research relative to the oral base of this literature (given student interest and access); Class discussion/participation. Papers should be documented to reveal depth of exploration. Oral presentations should as a matter of course seek to include the support of media such as hand-outs or outlines.

Evaluation Procedures

1. Quality of investigative techniques

2. Quality of examination response

3. Quality of scholarly essays

4. Quality of oral presentations, including class discussion/participation

Assignments

A. All students will complete four (4) essays and one (1) oral report [please see the attached "Assignments Explanation" for further detail]. All written work must be typed and conform to MLA standards. Everyone is responsible for reading the assigned texts listed on the "Schedule."

B. The essay papers are due as listed. The oral report is due as assigned during an in-class selection process. No work will be accepted more than one week after the assigned due date, and grades will be reduced by one letter grade for late submission. Students who miss class because of university sponsored activities must submit all assigned work prior to the absence.

C. Grades will derive from the quality of work submitted in Item A above, and from classroom attendance and participation.

ASSIGNMENTS EXPLANATION

The Essays

1. Write a unified statement assessing the authorial treatment of a selected critical property of the selected work or works of focus (i.e.: narrative strategy; tone; theme; characterization; etc.).

2. The four essays should be composed as follows:

essay 1-on tradition, voice, the artist’s expression via slave narrative (1000-1200 words)

essay 2-on mood, theme, formal properties/structure (1500 wds), 3 secondary sources

essay 3-on aesthetics as reflected by artist and audience evidence (1500 wds), 3 sec. srces

essay 4-literary analysis of a selected work as artful (2000 wds), 7 sec. srces

3. The essays should be documented, drawing upon secondary sources and any appropriate primary sources.

The Report

1. Select one or more works from the reading list on the course outline or as approved by me. This work will also be the topic for essay 4, a critical analysis of a literary art object.

2. Develop and present to the class a report of the critical worth of this selection. Identify what you consider the dominant aesthetic property in the work, and then tell how the artist develops this property (i.e.: authorial treatment of character, setting, plot, theme, point of view, dramatic force, poesis, etc.).

3. Compare and contrast the selection with some other pertinent work which the entire class read.

4. The report should be about 10 minutes long.

5. The report should include a content outline/hand-out for each member of your audience.

Attendance

Any student who is absent more than three times during the semester will receive a grade that is reduced by one full letter grade of that which is earned on the course work during the semester. Any student entering the class more than ten minutes late or leaving early will be counted absent one time for two late arrivals or early departures.

Topics

Black Traditions: African Heritage and Culture Language

Norton (N): Spirituals, Gospel; Blues, Secular Rhymes

N:Sermons; Folktales

African AmericanVoice-N:Olaudah Equaino (Slave Narratives); Frederick Douglas; N:Harriet Wilson

African American Literary Art-N:Chesnutt (Frame Narrative)

Polemics-N:Booker T. Washington; W. E. B. Du Bois

Dialect Tradition & Art-N: Dunbar

N:James Weldon Johnson

Harlem Renaissance-N:Locke, Garvey; McKay, Brown, Hughes, Cullen

N:Hurston; Toomer

A Black Aesthetic-N:Hughes 1267; Wright 1380; Ellison 1541; Baldwin 1654, 59

Fuller 1810; Gayle 1870; Neal 1960

Poetry-N:Hayden, Walker, Brooks; Mood & Style-N:Reed

Drama-N:Hansberry, Baraka

N:Morrison, Sula

Sula

Topics for Paper 1

See Syllabus, "Assignments Explanation."

  1. Present a thematic analysis of a "traditional" work, such as a spiritual, rhyme, sermon, or folktale. Since the focus is thematic, one approach might be to consider the feature of "intertextuality," that is, instances in which a line or idea appears in two different works or genres. Argue whether a theme seems best presented in one or the other work. Draw evidence from the works selected, and identify as you go along any other artistic strategies which enable the work to develop thematically.
  2. Select one or more, but not many, traditional works from our text, and argue whether the work is artistic in terms of the elements of literature: character, setting, plot, theme, point of view. Do not try to focus on all of these elements; rather, select one and develop an argument grounded in evidence provided by the selection[s].
  3. Select a work and argue whether it might have a particular function besides just plain artistic expression. Give evidence supporting your argument.
  4. What evidence internal to a selected work implies that an author acquires presence during an experience or crisis situation [select a work and examine the development of "voice"—self-esteem, assertiveness, independence of perception]?
  5. Define the mood of a single or a cluster of traditional works.

Note: Feel free to devise your own topic, but check with me about it. Tailor any of the above topics to your specifications.

Topics for Paper 2

See Syllabus, "Assignments Explanation."

  1. Frame narrative: Note the use of an internal and external voice relative to viewpoints. Discuss whether there is tension/conflict represented by this juxtaposition of voices.
  2. Frame narrative: Speculate on whether the device of a frame represents for the author a disposition toward the matter represented in the content of the work.
  3. Dialect: Does dialect add to or detract from the artfulness of the work?
  4. Forms [sermon, short story, poetry, etc.]: Examine some dialect and artful works in terms of whether something about the use of dialect gives the work special character, as with, for example, mood?
  5. Forms: Examine whether the artful adaptation of folk matter yields an aesthetic work which you can argue truly represents "black" art.
  6. Interplay among artist’s works [one artist or several artists]: Look at features such as mood, theme, formal properties; compare and or contrast works for influences.
  7. Devise your own topic in line with the "Assignments Explanation" and topics for paper 2.

Topics for Paper 3

See Syllabus, "Assignments Explanation."

  1. Select one or more fictional works by either Hughes, Wright, Ellison, or Baldwin, and analyze the presentation of one of the following elements of fiction:

character

setting

plot

theme

point of view

  1. Select Hansberry or Baraka [or do a comparative analysis using the two of them], and do analyze the presentation of one or more of the elements of drama. Establish in your argument whether the work is tragedy or comedy, and focus on a single literary element, only as needed drawing upon other elements.
  2. Given the poetry of Hayden, Walker, Reed, and or Brooks, argue about the artfulness of the work(s) within the context of controversy over "standard" criticism as opposed to a "black aesthetic" as the more appropriate evaluative process. Should your poet’s work be evaluated by either process? Can the work be better "appreciated" using one or the other process? Build your argument centered around one approach or the other.
  3. Given the standards for tragedy as represented by lectures on Aristotle’s ideas, analyze some element in Hansberry or Baraka, focusing on the extent to which these dramatists conform to or diverge from Aristotle’s standards. What, if anything, do you consider uniquely black about these dramatists’ approaches? Maybe the tonality (voices in an era of equal rights and social protest) of the works is noteworthy [and maybe not], for example.
  4. Select a topic of your own and develop an analysis of some literary property in some work referenced among the authors listed above.

English 345 Dr. Laura C. Jarmon

Black Writers in America.

Toni Morrison’s Sula

  1. Character
  1. town, people (blacks and whites: race)
  2. Shadrack
  3. Sula
  4. Others; grotesques
  1. Setting
  1. time—use of memory, reminiscence (reflection)
  2. place—active, participatory, like character
  3. chronological developments in selection and structure of story’s action
  1. Plot
  1. man vs man; vs. nature; vs. self
  2. content as story of loss: disappearance of "the Bottom": Medallion survives as golf course
  3. events not action-oriented, but fragmented as reminiscence (remembrance)
  4. mythical structure of action, journeys and destruction
  5. two-part division of story, chronology, exile and return; suspense, info given selectively
  6. incidents or episodes are highlights of the demise of a place
  7. conflicts are those of personal reflection, rather than exernal
  1. Theme
  1. change—pastness vs contemporaneity
  2. adapting, abilities, and choices; displacement
  3. amplification—details of myth, re: its purpose
  4. memory, identity, and community--legend
  5. symbols, perspective, and interpretation: [superstition]; joke; ritual; scapegoat
  6. values making a community, over against outsiders’ views of a group
  1. Point of View
  1. authorial vision—why the myth of destruction?
  2. idiom—repetitiveness—experiences of the people from a particular place [fragments & usage—like voice of actual speaker]; tags: "Jesus" for emphasis
  3. tone—use of insider voice, includes reader, "you"; sardonic—comments of observer with an interest in events, gives and takes back: "or so it seemed"; qualifies
  4. interior monologue—idiom repetitive, chatty yet reflective:compares times 1965 & 1921
  5. irony—what people know: Eva and boy
  6. retrospective presentation:events given must be explicated via story of earlier time/events