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Course Info for ENGL - 374 - 01, Spring 2025
Class number: 2900 Title: Race & Realism: African-Am Lit Department: English
Career: Undergraduate Component: Seminar Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 12 Current enrollment: 12 Available seats: 0
Start date: Tuesday, January 21, 2025 End date: Friday, May 9, 2025 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: R: 6:30PM-9:00PM, 115V - 103 Instructor(s): Mrozowski, Daniel
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities Requirement
Note: For majors enrolled before December 2023, this course fulfills the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written post 1900. For majors enrolled after January 2024, this course fulfills the post 1800 requirement and the UVSJ requirement or may be an elective/additional literature or film course.
Course Description:
Coming of age in the ruins of Reconstruction, the encroachment of Jim Crow laws, and waves of great migration, African American writers of the early 20th century shaped American literature in powerful and often-forgotten ways. Their texts, published in the decades before the Harlem Renaissance, offer an opportunity to consider how people produce literature under the pressures of structural racism; how art might respond to the terrorism of state sanctioned violence; how genres might stretch to articulate the psychological complexities of social and self identities; and how writers appeal to audiences, construct communities, forge friendships, and speak truth to power, despite institutional ambivalence and resistance to their voices. Course readings will come from Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar Nelson, WEB Du Bois and others. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written post-1900.