LITERATURE OF HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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Prerequisite: Not open to students with credit for LITT 3309.The two decades from 1917 to 1937 are traditionally identified as the period of artistic proliferation known as the Harlem Renaissance. A number of social factors, such as northward migration of southern blacks and Pan-African identification throughout the Diaspora, converged to help define this period. In an unprecedented proliferation of artistic works, Harlem's black literati celebrated, in their works, the cultural distinctions of their people. This surge of positive racial consciousness was buoyed on by the vociferous recognition of black literary artists by their white counterparts. Students in this course will read representative works of the Harlem Renaissance period, including, but not limited to the poetry of Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Countee Cullen and Claude McKay; the novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer; and critical literary studies of the period by observers writing then and now.