Black Writers In America
ENGL-A373-W01
Professor Barbara Ewell
This course surveys the many contributions of African-American writers to the literary traditions of the United States. Those contributions are virtually contemporary with the colonization of North America and have shaped the themes and genres of American literature for the last three hundred years. The wealth of available material will force us to be selective, but we will try to construct a coherent overview of the major writers and significant periods: from the slave narrative to local color fiction, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights movement. Writers will include Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison as well as lesser-known authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Jacobs, and Lorraine Hansberry. And to help us better appreciate the contexts of these works, we will also read a selection of non-fiction, by influential thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
For information about enrolling in Loyola Summer Session, call (504) 865-3523 or e-mail summer@loyno.edu.