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Course Info for ENGL - 432 - 01, Fall 2022
Class number: 3360 Title: Toni Morrison's BELOVED Department: English
Career: Undergraduate Component: Seminar Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: Yes Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 15 Current enrollment: 2 Available seats: 13
Start date: Tuesday, September 6, 2022 End date: Wednesday, December 21, 2022 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: W: 6:30PM-9:00PM, 115V - 106 Instructor(s): Paulin, Diana
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities Requirement
Note: For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1900.
Course Description:
This seminar interrogates the text and contexts of Toni Morrison's powerful and challenging novel, Beloved, bringing historical, theoretical, and cultural analysis to bear on a single work of fiction. We will consider how Morrison crafted a story about the horrors of slavery, as well as the value of excavating stories deemed unspeakable or illegible. This course surveys critical responses to Morrison's work and considers how contemporary theories of racial formation and embodied blackness inform the novel. We will also address the novel's representation of themes that speak to Black racial formations not only in the wake of slavery, but also in the context of contemporary topics such as migration, trauma and healing, neurodiversity, radical self-love, and Afro-environmentalism.