Teaching

In the face of slavery and its violent aftermath, African Americans turned their minds to the question of freedom. How could they free themselves? What would a free society look like? What forms of freedom did human beings most need in order to flourish? These imaginings of freedom are among the richest cultural legacies of the American people and they are a necessary part of any effort to understand the contradictory history of the United States. This seminar will provide an introduction to 19^th-century African American literature and politics, an extraordinary tradition in which an enslaved people dreamed of justice. We will read autobiographical slave-narratives, novels and poems, protests against slavery and lynching, demands for political rights and women’s equality, calls for slave rebellion and appeals for inter-racial cooperation. In addition to less well-known works, we will read some of the most famous writings in the African American tradition. (Readings will include: David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Wilson, T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.) By listening to spirituals and work-songs, we will also attempt to hear the aspirations of those who endured the experience of slavery and its aftermath, as they have been handed down through vernacular musical traditions. Throughout the semester, students will be encouraged to consider how these 19^th-century freedom dreams are relevant to the challenges we face in 21^st-century America. No prior study of African American history or culture will be required, but a willingness to engage in interdisciplinary inquiry will be expected.

This course will chart the development of modern American writing in the first half of the 20th century, as the bold new strategies of literary modernism replaced the traditions of 19^th-century realism. We will discuss the distinctive formal experiments of modernism in relation to the rapid social transformations of this period, including remarkable changes in the status of women, growing demands for racial equality by African Americans, and the intensifying class conflict that accompanied industrialization. One central unifying theme of the course will be the problem of modern warfare, which preoccupied writers and intellectuals in the early 20^th century, as it does many today. We will consider the ideological appeal of war during periods of social instability, as well as its ethical dilemmas, social causes and political consequences. We will read influential fiction by major modern novelists such as Twain, Hemingway, Cather, Dos Passos and Wright, as well as poems by H.D., Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, written in response to America’s early experiences of fully modern warfare. We will consider eloquent protests against war and trenchant political analyses of militarism by early 20^th-century intellectuals such as Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Max Eastman, Randolph Bourne, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Throughout the semester, we will explore the relevance of these fictions, poems and polemics to the challenges facing our own generation.

Realist and naturalist novelists wondered if Americans were becoming more or less free. Was moral choice possible in a market-driven society devoted to money-making? Could African Americans achieve equality or was racism irreversible? Could women claim new forms of social, professional and sexual freedom – or was male dominance inescapable? Was personal freedom possible for the poorest and most exploited Americans? Was the realm of psychology – the realm of desire, fantasy, self-consciousness – a domain of freedom or of uncontrollable compulsion? In this course, we will read masterpieces of realist and naturalist fiction, two of the most influential traditions in modern American literature. Readings will include fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Tillie Olsen and Richard Wright. As we explore these questions of freedom and determination, we will also read essays by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud so that we can consider the ways in which realist and naturalist modes of story-telling have influenced some of the most powerful theories of Western modernity. In your writing for this seminar, you will have an opportunity to explore the extent, and limits, of freedom in your own lives.

This course will provide students with an overview of the Harlem Renaissance. We will explore the flowering of African American literary, artistic and political life that took place in and around Harlem in the opening decades of the twentieth century. We will read fiction and poetry by writers such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Angelina Weld Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston,  James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Anne Spencer and Jean Toomer. Although literary texts will provide the central focus of our attention, this seminar will also be an interdisciplinary exploration of the Renaissance as an ambitious and complex cultural phenomenon. We will read and discuss major political writings in this period by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey and A. Phillip Randolph. We will also consider developments in the visual arts (including the paintings of Aaron Douglass and Archibald Motley, the photographs of James VanDer Zee and Richard S. Roberts, and the sculpture of Augusta Savage and Sargeant Claude Johnson) and in African-American music (Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington). We will consider these works in the context of contemporary scholarly debates about African American modernism and the problematics of diaspora. This seminar will also contribute to the department’s Literature and Social Justice curriculum, focusing attention on the ways in which the literature and expressive cultures of the Harlem Renaissance contributed distinctively to the African American freedom struggle and to feminist and socialist movements in the early twentieth century. Students do not need prior experience in interdisciplinary methods, but they will be expected to explore the connections among varied forms of artistic and political expression.

This seminar will explore major works of American literary modernism. We will consider how the formally experimental literature of the early 20^th century enabled American novelists and poets to map the structures of domination distorting American life, including intensifying economic exploitation during a period of rapid industrialization, the pathologies of the racial order during the era of Jim Crow, and anxious efforts to reassert male dominance in response to rapid changes in the sex-gender system. We will devote attention to the emotional work performed by modernist poems and novels, as writers struggled to mourn for the violent and alienating aspects of modern life and to work through the effects of traumatic collective experience. We will explore the still-undervalued utopian dimension of modernist writing in the United States, analyzing the sometimes fragmentary efforts of poets and novelists to imagine freer, fuller and more equitable ways of life. We will consider why some writers respond to social injury and loss by withdrawing into despair, by scapegoating the most vulnerable members of the social order – or by participating in movements for social justice. We will read fiction by Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hurston, and Toomer and poems by Eliot, Frost, H.D. Hughes, and Williams. Because we will be considering the ways in which literary works embody intimate psychological responses to large-scale social processes, students will read works of psychoanalytic theory about mourning and trauma, complemented by critical and theoretical works modeling other modes of interpretation.

(Developed and team-taught with Mary Foltz.)

As graduate students in the humanities, you are gaining specialized knowledge and technical expertise – and you are learning to master modes of writing that will enable you to present your work to other scholars at academic conferences and to publish in academic journals and at university presses. But like a growing number of humanities scholars today, you may also aspire to share your knowledge with broader audiences, to collaborate with those outside the university, and to contribute your growing academic expertise to broader movements for social justice. This seminar will introduce you to the theory and practice of the public humanities. You will leave the seminar with an understanding of the methods employed by public humanists and with tools for forging community-based collaborations and developing your writing for broader audiences.

The course opens with a brief overview of the emergence of and current theorizations of the public humanities. We will read debates among scholars about the public turn in the humanities – and we will consider how these practices are being defined and evaluated by major foundations, professional organizations, and public institutions. After setting the theoretical foundation for our work, the bulk of the seminar will introduce students to successful models and methods. You will study the work of distinguished literary critics and other humanities scholars (including faculty and alumni of our graduate program) who are writing for the mainstream press (long-form intellectual journalism, newspaper Op Eds, online venues). We will read inspiring models of literary non-fiction by authors working inside and outside of academia and reaching broad public audiences. We will read recent publications that describe community-based literary arts programming such as Engaging the Age of Jane Austen and The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey. We will consider how public humanists are employing practices of oral history and photography by reading works like Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present. You will be invited to consider which of these public humanities modes might be best suited to your own intellectual interests. Finally, you will have opportunities to practice – in low-stakes, experimental ways – these modes of working, which you may decide to pursue later in your graduate and professional career. Throughout the semester, we will consider how public humanities practice can enable you to form democratic collaborations with those outside the university and to participate in broader movements for social justice.