ENGL
337-01 African American Literature Fall
2003 TR 9:55-11:10 a.m. Newton 206
Dr. Beth
McCoy Office: Welles 232A Office phone: x5299
email: mccoy@geneseo.edu Home
phone: 224 0255 (no calls after 9
p.m., please)
website: www.geneseo.edu/~mccoy
Office Hours: TR 11:30-12:30 and other times as
arranged between student and instructor. In all
cases, I strongly encourage you to make an appointment before dropping in. My office gets extraordinarily busy; it
is not unusual for students to show up and find six or seven people in front of
them. If you make an appointment,
I can reserve time for you.
Course
Description (from Undergraduate Bulletin):
"A
study of works by representative African-American writers from the mid-19th
century to the present in their cultural and social contexts. The course will cover a variety of
genres." As you will see, we
will be shifting that description in some places, fulfilling it some places,
challenging it in some places.
What you need to understand from the beginning:
¥ This is a 300-level English course,
which requires at least 15 pages of writing. This
writing will be informal AND formal, according to
disciplinary conventions. This
writing will also include writing about scholarly and theoretical material that
is often seen as "subordinate" to "the literature."
¥ This is a course intended for but not
limited to English majors. Some of
what we will be doing,
then, may be discipline-specific, which can be strange if
one is unfamiliar with the theories, conventions, and practices of English
majors. But because African
American studies seeks to question disciplinary boundaries, some of what we do
can be strange if one is familiar with the theories, conventions, and practices
of English majors.
¥ This is a course that cannot be, should
not be, and, indeed, is not about learning about "African
American literature" or "people of African
descent" as objects of study.
This is a course that requires a relational approach to the literature,
the subject matters (of which there are many), and our class community.
Learning
Outcomes: By semester's end, you will
¥
locate, obtain, critique, and synthesize recent scholarly approaches to African
American
literary and cultural studies, and, by definition, American and global cultural
studies;
¥
developed (from subject to topic to thesis) an extended, argument-driven formal
essay;
¥ have
understood first-hand the difficulties and rewards of attempting to build
conversations
about aesthetic and political issues, including talking
about race as an "intellectual proposition" (Joyce Middleton's
term). This means to talk
not just about experience (e.g,, what happened to me) but more importantly about cognition: how the science fiction/social fact of 'race' organizes the
way human beings think and know, and how that 'fact'/'fiction'
is rooted in the seemingly neutral epistemological traditions and philosophies
of the so-called West.
Texts:
Liggins
Hill, Patricia, ed. Call and
Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary
Tradition. Houghton Mifflin Co; ISBN: 0395884055.
Butler,
Octavia. Bloodchild and Other
Stories. Seven Stories Press;
ISBN: 1888363363.
Parks,
Suzan-Lori. The America Play:
And Other Works.
Theatre Communications Group; ISBN: 1559360925
Assignments: All assignments must be
completed in order to pass the class.
1. Critical response papers: There are
three of these papers due throughout the semester; it is your responsibility to
watch the syllabus. (Please note
that two of them require additional reading: I will supply one essay for you, but for the other reading,
you will have to spend several weeks in advance reading a comic strip). These papers, though informal, are
designed to challenge you to think specifically and adventurously about some of
the larger issues framing the class.
They expect you (and reasonably so, I think) to be able to make and
develop meaningful connections among widely ranging texts. 25% of your grade.
2. Scholarly article assignment: Those of you who have worked with me before will
recognize this as a more humane version of the dreaded but beneficial annotated
bibliography assignment.
What does
a scholarly article look like?
Well, a scholarly article is one that appears in a scholarly journal or
edited volume, is relatively long (often 15-20 pages), uses some of the
specialized vocabulary of the discipline, is refereed by a board of editors/scholarly
readers, and features the paper trail (works cited, bibliography,
footnotes,endnotes) of the writer's sources. Ironically, those of you who are not English majors are
likely more familiar with scholarly material than many English majors. Finding the articles can be both the easiest and the most
difficult parts of this assignments.
DO NOT
limit yourself to the scant periodicals and books available in Milne. First, doing so will make you compete
with all the other students for a few volumes (and, yes, your peers can indeed
do unfair, nasty things like hide volumes, etc.). Second, you'll likely be missing some of the better, more
interesting articles out there.
Third, you'll be making more work for yourself in the long run because
you'll have to lug this stuff all over the library in search of a working
copier. Therefore, I highly
recommend starting early and using on-line databases and Interlibrary Loan (ILL copies stuff
for you, for free, and thus does not eat up your printing budget). And besides, I don't really want to
read the same two articles over and over and over.
Once
you've got the article, what do you do with it? Well, first you have to read it. I say this every semester, and no one believes me: you can't put off reading the article until the last minute,
either. Why? You'll likely have to read the article
more than once (*gasp!*).
What
articles do you need? Well, you
need one on the work of Suzan-Lori Parks and one on the work of
Octavia Butler. Note that you may not be able to
find articles that directly deal with the two books we are working with.
Now,the
actual writing part: On On
Tuesday, 30 September,
you will hand in a copy of each article's first page along with a
well-developed and specific paragraph of summary (single-spaced) that outlines:
a. the MLA bibliographical citation. An example: Awkward, Michael.
"Negotiations
of Power: White Critics, Black
Texts, and the Self-Referential Impulse." American Literary History 2.4
(Winter 1990): 581-605.
b. the source's major controlling
argument/assertion (you may have to reconstruct this);
c. the main points supporting that
assertion;
d. your critical response to the article. Does it make you think of things, make connections you
wouldn't have thought through on your own? Does it connect with other issues or texts that we have
dealt with this semester? What works well in the article? What works less well? DO NOT SKIMP ON THIS PART
(this is the part of the assignment that students most frequently skip or
subordinate). You are capable of
(and indeed are required to) make a critique that is more explicit and
thought-out than "I liked/did not like this article" or "this
was long" or "there are many big words here." Though I will not be counting words per se, your
paragraphs will need to be at least 400 words to convey the requisite components. NOTE: ATTRIBUTION IS KEY IN YOUR SUMMARY. I MUST IN EVERY SENTENCE BE ABLE TO
TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR REPORTING OF THE AUTHOR'S ARGUMENT AND YOUR OWN
IDEAS.
Along
with the two write-ups, you will also hand in a one-page, single-spaced cover
essay that informally reflects on the process of this assignment and what, if
anything, you learned from it. 25% of your final grade.
3. Formal essay: Five pages, typed, double-spaced. Using work by Suzan-Lori Parks or
Octavia Butler as your primary text, discuss how the novel
engages/develops/interrogates/intervenes in a critical issue that we have
discussed/read about/that you have been thinking about throughout the
semester. In your conclusion, you
will want to discuss in detail why/how what you have argued is important. For the most part, you will develop
your own topic into a well-organized, thesis-driven essay. 25% of your final grade.
4. Class participation: Includes attendance, active
participation in class and in small group work. Class participation means that you work actively to stretch
yourself intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually AND that you work
actively to contribute to the class's overall movement. This might mean, for example, moving
from merely your position during class discussion to striving to promote
dialogue between yourself and other students). I TAKE THIS GRADE VERY SERIOUSLY. If attending class is the bare
minimum of a student's responsiblity, how can someone who doesn't do the
reading and/or doesn't talk in class get anything more than a "C"
(and that's being generous)? 25%
of your final grade.
--------------------------------------------
If
you plan on doing any of the following things, you should probably drop this
class:
1. Remaining in your comfort zone and not
talking in class and justifying the silence by saying you are 'just the type of
person who likes to sit back and listen to what everyone else has to say.' Certainly, listening is a premium in
this class and is a crucial human skill. But real
listening only happens in an exchan ge.
Letting everyone else do the talking means that you're not really
listening because you are busy keeping yourself safe. Of course, this 'safety' is an illusion. Go read the bumper sticker on my door,
a bumper sticker that a student gave me.
It features a quote by Audre Lorde, and it says "Your silence will
not protect you."
2. Remaining in your comfort zone and not
talking in class and justifying the silence by saying you areafraid of offending others, especially "students
of color. " To paraphrase Toni Morrison, to do this is not at all an act of graciousness; rather,
it is an act of violence that function to protect privilege.
3. Remaining in your comfort zone and not
talking in class and justifying the silence because you assume that you don't
know enough to participate in class and other people (especially those who
talk) do. To approach the
class and the work in a way that suggests that one can speak only about what is
already known
is not only dangerous, but it's also intellectually lazy. beth here gives mini-homily about
'not knowing,' guilt, responsibility, and the crucial critical question (now
that I 'know' this: what
happens?).
4. Remaining in your comfort zone and not
talking (or talking in class) because you assume you know way too much about
what you think this class is about and are "bored." This presumes that American culture and
its assorted inheritances of race, class, gender, sexualities, cultures,
aesthetics, politics, spiritualities etc. are so self-evident that any one
person can comprehend them all, and that the way those things are currently
packaged for us is sufficient or even desirable.
5. Complaining when everyone does talk that it's a waste of time and inefficient.
6 Spending your valuable intellectual and
emotional energy assessing who's working harder than anyone else; to whom beth
is supposedly paying more attention to, etc. etc. etc.
7. Remaining so married to New Critical
formalism* and/or to the ways that you may have been taught previously that you
see as a 'tangent' any meaningful, principled discussion that doesn't
necessarily mention the word "theme" or "symbolism." Just because the normative educational
culture of a nation afraid more than anything else that its students will learn
to think divides classroom activity into
binaries of 'on-task' and 'off-task' doesn't mean that that is a useful or even
humane way of doing things.
*New Critical formalism is a way of reading and
thinking about literature conceptualized by the Fugitives, a group of white
Southern intellectuals (among them John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen
Tate, etc.) during the early twentieth century. Though it has its roots in larger European traditions, it
was developed by the Fugitives as a sort of antidote to the political and
social trends they saw around them in the time and region in which they worked
and thought. According to New
Criticism, works of literature are self-contained art 'objects' that exist
independently of the world around them; art objects have no link to the
reader's feelings, to the historical context in which the objects were
produced, to the author's intentions or biography. All that matters, according to the New Critics, is what goes
on inside the text (yes, they imagined that there is an absolute division
between inside and outside the text), hence their concentration on close
reading and the development of terms such as 'image' and 'symbol.' Though New Criticism is now largely out
of favor as a critical technique, you will note that its assumptions and tools
are rather familiar to you as students--the theory provided much of the
language with which you were taught to engage literature as early as middle
school and the kinds of terms that the Regents and AP exams required you to use
[It may also seem paradoxical that in a partial way, the New Critics
democratized literary study by believing they could provide everyone with one
standard, knowable set of 'tools'].
Of course, you were also taught to employ historical context, author's
intentions , biography, and your 'own
feelings' etc.--but when students show alarm that we're "not talking about
the literature enough," the New Critical part of their disciplinary
training is showing. It's
important to know this because the "political and social trends" that
the Fugitives sought to evade or combat through New Criticism included
modernization, racial desegregation, and the challenging of conservative faith
traditions.
Grading
Breakdown from the Undergraduate Bulletin: A range: excellent; B range: very good; C+/C: satisfactory; C-: minimal competence;
D: marginal; E: failure. In grading individual assignments, I
use splits (e.g., C+/B-) to calculate as closely as possible your grade (in
almost all cases, this only helps you). As you improve during the semester, expectations
for your work go up as well.
Daily
Schedule: This may change at
any time; your continued attendance is therefore crucial.
August
T 26 Syllabus
and introductions. Come prepared to talk about the following question: Who are you? Why is this an important question to answer at the beginning
of a class where many non-black students say they come to learn
"about" African Americans?
R 28 Who
are you?" continued. Read: Barkley Brown essay and Cleeton/Gross
essay. " Turn
in a 2-page, single-spaced response paper that addresses the following
questions: What does non-African American
literature cover? What do you
expect non-African American literature to be about? Where did you get those expectations? What does it turn out to be
"about" in your classes?
Why am I asking this question at the beginning of an African American
Literature survey? Please be
specific; remember, I cannot get inside your head. Additionally, please append a serious, respectful,
one-paragraph account of what happens in a typical English department class
period.
September
T 2 Bernice
Johnson Reagon, "The Songs are Free" video shown in class today.
R 4 Call
and Response, Douglass, 272-319.
Also, go to my website link for this class and read the
"paratext" handout.
T 9 Call
and Response, Jacobs, from Incidents, 432-468
Start reading the material for the response paper due on T November
4.
R 11 Catch-up.
T 16 Call
and Response, Garnet, 264-272; Delany, 473-489, Stewart, 395-404.
R 18 Call
and Response, DuBois, 742-748; 749-754. Also Call and Response, Dunbar, "We Wear the
Mask," 615.
T
23
Catch-up day.
R 25 Call
and Response, Terry, "Bars Fight, 91."
T 30 Dunbar,
"Lager Beer" (handout), "A Cabin Tale" (handout). Scholarly
article write-up package due in class today.
October
R 2 Catch-up
day.
________________________________________________________________________
T 7 Call
and Response, rigorously browse the section on Harlem Renaissance poets,
866-922. Also, Lindsay, "The Congo"
(handout). Film clip.
R 9 Catch-up
day.
T 14 No
class; fall break
R 16 Call
and Response, Giovanni, "For Saundra," 1555, and
"Ego-Tripping," 1559; Clifton, "the making of poems,"
1536. Also, Reed, "I am
a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra," 1655; "Beware: Do Not Read this Poem," 1658. . For today, read
Ueno, "Japanimation:
Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes, and Rave Culture" (photocopy) and
turn in a 2-page, single-spaced response paper that addresses the following
questions: Using some key texts, we spent
some time talking about cultural appropriation in class. Though Ueno's article may seem to
engage subject matter "not related" to our class, it is nevertheless
useful and quite relevant. How
does Ueno's article add extra dimensions to our conversation--things that all
of us have to think about and negotiate
Additionally,
please start to read Call and Response, Hansberry, A Raisin in the
SunÑyou will be held responsible for this reading on R November 6.
________________________________________________________________________
T 21 Call
and Response, Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," 1449-1458.
R 23
Call
and Response, Joyce, "The Black Canon," 1458-1465.
________________________________________________________________________T 28 Call
and Response, Gates, "What's Love Got to Do with It?" 1467-1480.
R 30 Suzan-Lori
Parks, "Possession,Ó "An
Equation for Black People Onstage," and "from 'Elements of
Style.'" Also browse among
the plays.
November
T 4 Call
and Response, Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. Today, turn in a
2-page, single-spaced response paper that addresses the following
questions: For this short paper, you will
take as your primary text the comic strip "Boondocks" by Aaron
McGruder. To get the strip, go to
www.boondocks.net (this is the official site and includes 'fan' mail, etc.) or
straight to http://www.ucomics.com/boondocks/ if you just want the comic
strip. This essay is due on
, but it is your responsibility to start NOW, as I will have expected
you to have read "Boondocks" consistently for several weeks. How does studying "Boondocks"
jibe with the other literature we are reading in this class? Please note that I'll just get a
massive headache if the papers say "oh, they're all about 'oppression' or
someone's 'plight.'
R 6 Call
and Response, Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun.
T 11 Parks,
ÒImperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom.Ó
R 13 Parks,
ÒImperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom.Ó
T 18 Butler,
"Preface," "Positive Obsession," and "Furor
Scribendi."
R 20 Butler,
ÒBloodchild.Ó
T 25 Butler,
ÒBloodchild.Ó continued.
R 27 No
class; Thanksgiving break.
December
T 2 Voluntary
conferences on final paper.
R 4 Last
day of class. Evaluations and
conferences.
Final Exam for this class, during which you will turn in
your final paper: T 16 December,
8-11 a.m.