Course Description

Honors African American Literature uses the pedagogical methods common to all Honors courses: writing-intensive, collaborative, and experiential instruction. As an honors course, there will be focus on analytical writing and an emphasis on a higher degree of student participation and leadership in class discussions and other interactive teaching/learning techniques that are generally unsuitable for larger undergraduate classes. This course examines African American Literature from the 1700s to the present. Emphasis is given to the development of a body of literature that attests to the mastery and enhancement by Black writers of the prevailing literary forms in each era in America's cultural, social, and political history. Students in the course have the opportunity to examine how literature reflects the experiences of Africans adapting to life in new world America, their struggle against and resistance to institutional racism, their efforts to create racial and social justice, solidarity, and liberation while carving out a new identity and developing new literary styles and conventions. The literature is examined through lenses of conventional critical theory and elements of literature.