Topics in American Literature

Marking the centennial of his birth in 1924, this class will examine why James Baldwin became the twentieth-century African American author most loved in the twenty-first. An inexhaustible public witness and the author of poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories, the Harlem-born Baldwin ranks with the most daring and elegant American literary voices. His first novel, the autobiographical "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), wrestled with the dual heritage of Black Christianity and Depression-era Black social realism. His second novel, "Giovanni's Room" (1956), set in Paris and peopled with non-black characters, explored the intricacies of same-sex desire years before the Stonewall rebellion announced the gay rights movement. "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), the first collection of Baldwin's lush and searching essays and a grandparent of twenty-first century autocriticism, is perhaps the most-tweeted book of our era. Our reading list will contain all of these books, but we'll end with a sequence of texts revealing various facets of Baldwin's resurrected meaning in the wake of Black Lives Matter: among them, Ta-Nehisi Coates's memoir "Between the World and Me" (2015); Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" (2017); and Eddie Glaude Jr.'s Trump-era treatise "Begin Again" (2020). Altogether, this will be a single-author course on a singular author whose life after death illuminates crucial issues in Black cultural politics in two centuries. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; AS SD I; FA HUM; EL TC; EL GML

Topics in American Literature

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 423

Section 01

Section 02