ENGL 335
The Great Debates: African American Literary Criticism Fall 2019
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

This course foregrounds the central debates, key questions, and methods that have been vital to the field of African American literature. We will ground our readings of fiction within African American literary theory and criticism from the 1920s through the present. This course is organized around four moments: (1) articulations of an emergent black critical aesthetic in the 1920s, (2) assertions of black nationalism and black feminisms as critical imperatives in the 1970s and beyond, (3) considerations of the value of structuralism to black narratives in the 1980s, and (4) investments in queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and the turn to affect in our current moment. We will engage such questions as: What is the role of the critic and of criticism and theory? How do we account for multiple interpretations of texts? Texts will be paired with criticism from various moments, which will allow us to interrogate the questions of language, signification, politics, embodiment, and nationalism that maintain this robust field of inquiry.