Fall 2005 Courses

English 380: The Harlem Renaissance (English)

MWF 1:10-2:10pm
OM 011

In this course, we will ask a wide variety of literary, aesthetic, political, and historical questions about an equally wide variety of cultural productions from the Harlem Renaissance (roughly 1910-1935).   We will study figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Angelina Weld Grimke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Oscar Micheaux, and James Van der Zee, among many others.  Our texts will include: ragtime, the blues, film, photography, poetry, novels, short stories, plays, autobiographies, fictional autobiographies and autobiographical fictions, and literary and cultural criticism.  As we closely read, view, and listen, we will investigate: the movement’s chronological, geographic, and cultural boundaries; the ways that Harlem Renaissance artists and writers constructed and represented a “New Negro”; class, gender, and color conflict within the movement; tensions regarding “highbrow” versus “lowbrow” cultural production; modern urban representations of a rural past; the trope of “passing”; the power and presence of gays and lesbians in what one critic has termed “the gayest Renaissance in history”; debates regarding white patronage and audience; the relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to Modernism; and the various “criteria of Negro art” being advanced by a range of Harlem Renaissance figures.  We will, finally, explore the current status of the Harlem Renaissance as a field of study and interest.  Requirements for the course include: weekly 1-page responses to the reading, one essay of about 5 pages, one term paper of about 20 pages, and one 20-minute presentation. This course will fulfill the college’s domestic diversity requirement and the English department’s “emergent voices” requirement for majors.

Fall 2005 Course Listings