First-Year Studies: 20th-Century Black Women’s Writing

Catalog description

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury,” Audre Lorde writes. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Poetry, Lorde continues, helps to bring about an understanding of what is, as well as to imagine what might be. This understanding of literature as shedding new light on existence and as sketching new possibilities held a profound political importance for the tradition of Black women’s writing. This seminar seeks to study that tradition in the 20th century, from writing on the difficulties of Jim Crow, through mid-century responses to the Cold War and the heyday of Black Feminism, to the responses to neoliberal multiculturalism at the century’s close. We will consider Black women’s prose, poetry, drama, and more by authors such as Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and more. Course work will include short analytic essays and a longer research-based conference project. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. First-Year Studies: Forms and Logic of Comedy