This course explores the changing audiences for African American Literature through an examination of three genres of African American Literature: The Slave Narrative, The Urban Novel, and The Folk Tradition. We will read a range of text to understand each genre's early beginnings as well as the pressures varying times and different audiences exert on the form. Slave Narratives by Harriot Jacobs and Frederick Douglass will be juxtaposed to fictional Neo Slave Narratives by Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison. The Urban Novel will be explored in its Naturalist form (Richard Wright and Ann Petry) and its modernist form, Ellison's Invisible Man. We will consider the richness of the Folk Tradition in Charles Chesnutt and Gloria Naylor. Throughout the course we will consider issues of gender and class as taken up in these texts. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: active participation in class and 20 pages of writing in the form of journal entries and short papers. No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 19 per section (expected: 19 per section). Preference given to first-year students. Two sections.

Hour: BOELCSKEVY