CCOG for ENG 258 archive revision 202404
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- Effective Term:
- Fall 2024
- Course Number:
- ENG 258
- Course Title:
- African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance
- Credit Hours:
- 4
- Lecture Hours:
- 40
- Lecture/Lab Hours:
- 0
- Lab Hours:
- 0
Course Description
Addendum to Course Description
Surveys the creative literature of black writers in the United States with special attention given to the social and symbolic environments from which they emerged, protest against racist violence, socioeconomic mobility, and creation of a modern day Black aesthetic.
Intended Outcomes for the course
Upon successful completion of the course students should be able to:
- Analyze African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present to identify themes about race, ethnicity, and culture and recognize the contribution of African American writers to recreate cultural identity.
- Examine the intersection of economics, history, culture, politics, religion, and gender to African American literature.
- Use literary terminology and theory to examine relationships between literary forms and themes.
- Identify the relationship between African American literary forms and Black vernacular (gospel, blues, jazz, sermons, stories, and the oral tradition).
- Write coherent academic essays that explore the complexity of the literature.
Integrative Learning
Students completing an associate degree at Portland Community College will be able to reflect on one’s work or competencies to make connections between course content and lived experience.
General education philosophy statement
English and Writing courses align with the PCC General Education philosophy by providing an appreciation of writing and literature from global and personal perspectives. Students in English courses engage the imagination, critical inquiry and self‐reflection, and in the process of doing so, cultivate a more complex understanding of their own culture(s), linguistic/communication practices, and perspectives in relation to others. Because the literary arts lie at the heart of most human cultures, they are essential for understanding each other and navigating our differences.
In literature classes, students explore significant texts from diverse cultures and periods in history. Students look closely at texts from a range of genres, articulating the way elements of writing, content, form, and style are interrelated, and considering how values and interpretations have changed over time and through different theoretical lenses. Students engage texts through critical analysis and creative response, learning to use evidence to support their interpretations and to navigate critical conversations. Students explore literature both as an art form designed to provoke thought and challenge social norms, and as an expression of human experience.
Writing and Literature courses foster a stronger sense of engagement with history, culture, and society. Writing and Literature students develop an awareness of themselves as readers and writers in a global world, and an enlarged understanding of the relationships between language, identity, ideas, scholarship, communication, and transformation.
Aspirational Goals
Relate the writings of the African Americans from the time of slavery through the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary African American writing.
Identify the shared experiences in the writing of the time period to the contemporary Black experience.
Investigate the institutional and cultural forces that seek to erase African American Literature.
Course Activities and Design
Students read, discuss, write and perform research on related topics and events presented in the literature. Class activities may include instructor lecture, whole class discussion, small group work, student presentations and guest lectures.
Outcome Assessment Strategies
1. Recognize the importance of self-documentation as a means to claim the African American identity.
2. Examine the intersection of economics, history, culture, region, politics, religion, gender, and sexuality to African American literature.
3. Understand the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the contemporary African American experience.
4. Identify the relationship between African American literary forms and Black vernacular.
5. Discuss the resistance to the white gaze upon African American literature and the Black body.
Students will complete a term project, typically a research paper of 1500-2000 words in length, pertinent to the literature of the period. Instructors may also permit alternatives to the traditional research paper. Such alternatives include the following possibilities: scrapbook/family history projects; websites; PowerPoint presentations; multimedia presentations; portfolios of creative writing or visual art forms; dance, theatrical or spoken word performances. Instructors who permit such alternatives will ensure that students also write substantive analytical pieces in the form of journal, examination, or other appropriate format. Additionally, instructors may use a variety of other assessment tools such as quizzes, participation, etc.
Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)
Some of the central concepts of the course include:
Transformation of African American writing as a body of literature, its history, and the major and minor figures after the Harlem Renaissance to the present.
Self documentation and fictional self documentation as self actualization, a form of resistance against Eurocentric ideas of Blackness, and its importance to the preservation of Black culture.
The slave narrative, the neo slave narrative, and its relationship to contemporary African American biography.
The importance of the writers directly following the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement (1940s-1960s) and their influence on later writers.
The creation of Black Arts Movement, its importance as the artistic arm of the Civil Rights Movement, its founders, major practitioners, tenants, and criticisms.
Womanist writers and its formation as a counterpoint to the racism of the Women’s Liberation Movement in North America.
The relationship between Protorap, Hip-Hop, and Contemporary Spoken Word, and the origin of contemporary Spoken Word roots in comedy and community engagement.
The emergence of contemporary Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Writing.
Suggested Writers:
James Baldwin
Gwendolyn Brooks
Ralph Ellison
Lorraine Hansberry
Richard Wright
Ann Petry
Melvin B. Tolson
Margaret Walker
Maya Angelou
Amiri Baraka
Mari Evans
Eldridge Cleaver
Ethridge Knight
Audre Lorde
Haki Madhubuti
Ishmael Reed
Larry Neal
Maya Angelou
Toni Cade Bambara
Lucille Cliffton
Nikki Giovanni
Michael S. Harper
June Jordan
Toni Morrison
Sonja Sanchez
Elizabeth Alexander
Octavia Butler
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Rita Dove
Jericho Brown
NK Jemison
Essex Hemphill
Yusef Komunyakka
Harryette Mullen
Gloria Naylor
Claudia Rankine
Sonia Sanchez
Patricia Smith
Danez Smith
Tracy K. Smith
Natasha Trethewey
Colson Whitehead
August Wilson
Kevin Young