2019-2020
ENGL 541-001 – Studies in American Literature
“Tracing Race in American Literature”
Studies in American Literature Since 1890
Term 1
Fridays, 1:30 am – 4:30 pm
“Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race, and you can’t find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can’t see it.” (Toni Morrison interview)
We will read a selection of essential works of American literature that situate their complex and violent tracings of race in relation to the history of slavery, racial segregation and Jim Crow, Civil Rights, mass incarceration, and voter suppression. How can “race” be difficult to find in a society dominated, since 1619, by the division between black and white?
There will be two reading lists. The primary list will be common to all participants in the seminar, the basis of weekly discussions and presentations. Participants will also help to compile a secondary, annotated reading list–dynamic and open-ended–in support of research projects both small and large to be shared with the group.
Final selections for the primary list will be drawn from the following:
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)
- Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855)
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
- Kate Chopin, “Desirée’s Baby” (1893)
- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
- James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
- W.E.B. Du Bois, “White Imperialism” (1914)
- Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
- Ernest Hemingway, “The Battler” (1925)
- Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
- William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
- Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1972)
- Don DeLillo, End Zone (1972)
- Wallace Terry, ed., Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History (1984)
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
- Hortense Spillers, Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President” (2017)
Requirements:
- Active participation in the seminar’s exchange and discussion, and
- a ten-minute informal presentation, 10%
- a two-page essay (distributed and read aloud), 15%
- a seminar presentation, 25%
- a final essay, 50%
Epigraphs:
“My father was a white man.” (Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave)
“What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery! Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing through the veins of American slaves?” (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
“’It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray. And my skin is fair,’ seizing his wrist. ‘Look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand,’ she laughed hysterically.” (“Desirée’s Baby” by Kate Chopin)
“He watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a Kodak print emerging from the liquid.” (Faulkner, Light in August)
“We’re all black to the white man, but we’re a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, look at each other!” (Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
“Abraham was black. Did you know that? Mary the mother of Jesus was black. Rembrandt and Bach had some Masai blood. It’s all in the history books if you look carefully enough. Tolstoy was three-eighths black. Euclid was six-fifths black. Not that it means anything. Not that any of it matters in the least. Lord, I think I’m beginning to babble.” (Taft Robinson, in Don DeLillo’s End Zone)
“the people who think they are white” (Coates, Between the World and Me)
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