230588 Introduction to African American Literature (S) (SoSe 2008)

This introductory class to African American literature will explore aspects of the black American literary canon in historical periods such as, among others, slavery, the Reconstruction Period, Harlem Renaissance, Realism, and Black Arts Movement, and literary forms--autobiography, poetry, drama, novel, essays, speech, etc. Students will acquire the historical knowledge required to discuss and examine African American literature, a tradition that, as Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay remind us, in their Introduction to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, emerged out of resistance "against the greatest odds" aiming to prove that "people of African descent [...] were, indeed, full and equal members of the community of rational, sentient beings, that they could indeed write."