Overview Sample - ENGL5232U
(ENGL 5232U, African-American Literature, David Dudley)
Introduction
This course offers a survey of African-American literature from
the mid-nineteenth century to the present day through a detailed study of nine
important African-American writers. For the English major, the course provides
knowledge of authors and works not ordinarily encountered in any other class,
even in this day of literary canon expansion. Students contemplating public
school teaching careers will become familiar with material useful in the classroom.
Anyone who completes the course will read works of the highest literary quality
and will also learn much about racial and cultural issues lying at the heart
of American life and history.
One can argue that slavery is the central experience in African-American
history, the nightmare that has haunted the imaginations of black writers up
to this day. Accordingly, in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred we will find
Edana (“Dana”) Franklin, a black woman living in California in 1976,
being transported through time and space back to antebellum Maryland, where
she experiences the horrors of slavery she and other African Americans of our
time have only read about. Surely it is no accident that Octavia Butler sends
her heroine to Talbot County, Maryland, home of Frederick Douglass, whose 1845
Narrative—the first text we read in this course—also details the abuses
of slavery. Like Dana Franklin, Douglass survives his ordeal in slavery, but
does not come away unscarred. In addition to Douglass and Butler, you will read
seven other authors, all of whom deal directly or indirectly with slavery and
its terrible legacy of racial oppression.
African-American literature does not concentrate solely, however,
on slavery and ongoing discrimination. True, the often harsh and unjust realities
of black life in America find painful expression in African-American literature;
nevertheless, black writers also deal with the human experience in all its variety
and complexity, with men and women in all their “beauty, dread, [and] power,”
as James Baldwin eloquently expresses it. A distinguishing mark of much of this
literature lies in the heightened difficulty of its characters’ struggle
to create meaningful lives for themselves, a struggle made more arduous because
of institutionalized violence, discrimination, and injustice. Yet African-American
writers also celebrate the rich cultural traditions and practices of a people
whose heritage flows from two continents, two distinct ways of life.
More than other writers, African-American authors write with
a sense of urgency, knowing the importance of their message. Sometimes their
purpose is overt: both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wrote autobiographies
to alert their readers to the evils of slavery and to win support for the abolitionist
cause. In Native Son, Richard Wright advocates no specific plan of social action,
but the novel quivers with a need to alert white Americans to the horrific conditions
in their inner cities that help create individuals like Bigger Thomas, its desperate
anti-hero. Given their sense of mission to inform their readers of social problems
or to advocate change, African-American writers are keenly attuned to their
audience’s receptivity and prejudices. Finding a voice and a way to be
heard are problems confronting every author, but among black writers such as
Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, and Richard Wright, the issue is especially
pressing.
Your study of African-American literature will reward you with
knowledge of the sweep of African-American history, an understanding of black
Americans’ linguistic, religious, and cultural traditions, and a sense
of the triumph of black life in this country, a victory won in the face of daunting
odds. This is a rich literature, deeply felt, powerfully told, and adventurously
innovative. Because of the African-American writer’s sense of urgency,
this literature gives the reader a heightened sense of being directly addressed;
often the text seems to hit the reader squarely between the eyes and say, “I’m
talking to you.” To study African-American literature is to be sometimes
saddened, often angered, frequently shocked, and many times shamed, but always
to be engaged by writing that is persistently, tenaciously alive.
Although previous knowledge of African-American history is not
required for successful completion of this course (in fact, the course will
provide you with much historical information), some familiarity with black history
and culture would undoubtedly be beneficial. One need not be an English major
to succeed in the course; anyone who finds the material interesting, enjoys
reading, and writes reasonably well should be able to succeed in this course.
