OBERLIN COLLEGE

ENGLISH 260 -- MODERN AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL

Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:15, Fall 1998

Professor: Ms. Gillian Johns

Office: Rice Hall 28

Telephone: 775-8921

Office Hours: Tuesdays 11:45-1:45, Thursdays 12:30-2:30

and by appointment (see me or call the office)

Description of Course:

This course serves dual purposes--as an introduction to both college-level study of literature generally within the English major at Oberlin and study of African-American fiction in particular. As such, we will read closely the novels listed below in tandem with selected critical essays seeking to define the literature as a unified body and advocating various approaches to reading within it. African-American literature and criticism has been discussed and written about widely throughout the twentieth century (though it has only recently been institutionalized as a discipline in its own right). And key questions having to do with, for example, relationships between and among the functions of art and social protest, race-based authenticity, nationalism, and cultural integration, and the uniqueness of the Black Experience in America have repeatedly been brought to bear on the literature. By the end of the course, by reading major examples of both primary and secondary works from different periods and schools of fiction during the "modern" era--the Harlem Renaissance, the "protest" era, and mature modernism and postmodernism--students should be familiar with the various styles and forms of writing the writers have selected and be able to recognize their thematic and formal relationships as well as their primary contributions and limitations regarding the effort to create an African-American novelistic literary tradition.

Required Texts:

Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Duke UP, 1994)

Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (U of Chicago P, 1987)

Reader of Selected Essays (to be purchased through English Department office)

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Random House, 1989)

Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Rutgers UP, 1986)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Harper & Row, 1990)

Richard Wright, Native Son (HarperCollins, 1993)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Random House, 1995)

Toni Morrison, Sula (Signet, 1993)

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (S&S, 1996)

Expectations/Requirements:

Class Framework, Attendance, and Participation--This course will proceed largely through close reading and discussion of the primary works of fiction and points of view raised by complement-ary secondary readings, as scheduled below. This primary format will interspersed with lecture on background materials and context as necessary and as time permits. From time to time, members of the class will be asked to divide into smaller groups to focus on specific questions and/or problems raised by the reading; thus, participation during class will be invaluable and expected and will contribute (20%) to the final grade. In addition to regular class attendance and involve-ment, however, students are strongly encouraged to meet individually with the professor for one conference (a sign-up sheet will be circulated a couple of weeks into the course) to discuss their understanding of the readings and/or individual papers.

Course Papers--Students are required to produce three (3) papers during the semester, which will together constitute 80% of their course grade: two shorter papers (4 to 5 pages, typed double spaced, with one-inch margins all around), most likely on assigned topics (each 20% of grade); and one longer, in-depth essay (10 to 12 pages, also typed double spaced, with one-inch margins all around) concerning an appropriately literary topic of choice (40% of grade). Though they are to be in the form of an argument (including a thesis statement) and will ask for "close" reading and citation of passages from the appropriate text(s), the shorter papers may be approached as "thought-in-progress" responses to new material; students are invited in these earlier papers to try to engage and analyze various of the theoretical and critical issues and questions arising through our reading and discussion. The longer paper--which must be discussed with the professor-- should demonstrate more focus on one or two problems or questions having to do the theme(s), technique(s), and/or structure of one novel (either on or off our reading list). (More detail will come regarding these writing assignments.)

Reading and Assignment Schedule:

Thursday, Sept. 3:	Course Introduction; Contexts for Approaching Twentieth-Century African-American Fiction and Literary Modernism
Tuesday, Sept. 8:	James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (chaps. 1 through 6); Braithwaite, "The Negro in American Literature"
Thursday, Sept. 10:	Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (chaps. 7 to end)
Tuesday, Sept. 15:	Nella Larsen, Quicksand (entire novella)
Thursday, Sept. 17:	Alain Locke, "The New Negro"; W. E. B. DuBois, "Criteria of Negro Art"; Sterling Brown, "Our Literary Audience"
Tuesday, Sept. 22:	Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (chaps. 1 through 12); Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression"
Thursday, Sept. 24:	Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (chaps. 13 to end); Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"; George Schuyler, "The Negro-Art Hokum"
Tuesday, Sept. 29:	Nathan Huggins, "Epilogue" to Harlem Renaissance; Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Thursday, Oct. 1:	Synthesis of Readings; PAPER #1 DUE
Tuesday, Oct. 6:	Richard Wright, Native Son (book 1); James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel"; Hurston, "What White Publishers Won't Print"
Thursday, Oct. 8:	Wright, Native Son (book 2)
Tuesday, Oct. 13:	Wright, Native Son (book 3)
Thursday, Oct. 15:	J. Saunders Redding, "American Negro Literature"; Craig Werner, "Bigger's Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American Modernism"
Tuesday, Oct. 20:	FALL BREAK
Thursday, Oct. 22:	FALL BREAK
Tuesday, Oct. 27	Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (prologue and chaps. 1 through 7)
Thursday, Oct. 29:	Ellison, Invisible Man (chaps. 8 through 12)
Tuesday, Nov. 3:	Ellison, Invisible Man (chaps. 13 through 17); Arthur P. Davis, "Integration and Race Literature"
Thursday, Nov. 5:	Ellison, Invisible Man (chaps. 18 through 22); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext"
Tuesday, Nov. 10:	Ellison, Invisible Man (chaps. 23 to end); LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), "The Myth of Negro Literature"; Addison Gayle, Jr., "Cultural Strangulation"; Sarah Webster Fabio, "Tripping with Black Writing"
Thursday, Nov. 12:	Synthesis of Readings; PAPER #2 DUE
Tuesday, Nov. 17:	Toni Morrison, Sula (part 1); Deborah McDowell, "Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin--Sula"
Thursday, Nov. 19:	Morrison, Sula (part 2); Barbara Smith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism"; McDowell, "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism"
Tuesday, Nov. 24:	HIATUS (Individual Conferences to be Scheduled as Make-Up)
Thurs. Nov. 26:	THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY
Tuesday, Dec. 1:	Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (chaps. 1 through 25)
Thursday, Dec. 3:	Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (chaps. 26 through 50); Sami Ludwig, "Dialogic Possession in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo: Bakhtin, Voodoo, and the Materiality of Multicultural Discourse"; John Lowe, "Monkey Kings and Mojo: Postmodern Ethnic Humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor"
Tuesday, Dec. 8:	Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (chaps. 51 to end); W. Lawrence Hogue, "Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice"
Thursday, Dec. 10:	Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory"; Michael Awkward, "Appropriative Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism"
Tuesday, Dec. 15:	FINAL PAPERS DUE 10:00 a.m., Rice Hall 28