Black Southern Literature (one section)
This is a special topics course in African American literature. In this course, students study popular culture and literature to analyze the complicated discourse surrounding the Black Southern Experience. This course also engages interdisciplinary texts and forms of inquiry, which will encourage students to produce interdisciplinary projects.
Authors Included: Kiese Laymon, Jessmyn Ward, Imani Perry, Charles Blow, Ernest Gaines, bell hooks, Natasha Trethewey
Special Topics: Black Hair Narratives-English 3085 (three sections)
This is a special topics course in African American literature. In this course, students study popular culture and literature to analyze the complicated discourse surrounding Black hair and expression. This course also engages interdisciplinary texts and forms of inquiry, which will encourage students to produce interdisciplinary projects.
Works Included: Zadie Smith, White Teeth, Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon, Ingrid Bank, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness
African American Literature I (two sections)
This course will cover a wide range of literary texts from early part of the nineteenth century to right before the Harlem Renaissance. This class studies texts from a variety of genres as students seek to understand the ways that Black people conceived of race and identity in the early part of the nation’s founding. This course discusses the ways that African Americans dealt with existential issues like the concept of blackness as a cultural and political idea, both in fiction and non-fiction writing.
Major Text: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Vol. 1
Authors Included: David Walker, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Alice Dunbar Nelson.
African -American Literature II (two sections)
This course will cover a wide range of literary texts from the Modernist, Post-Modern and contemporary era. This class studies texts from a variety of genres as students will engage texts that address contemporary issues of feminism, class and gender that have evolved from earlier forms of the literature. This course will continue the discussion of the ways that African Americans dealt with existential issues like the concept of blackness as a cultural and political idea, both in fiction and non-fiction writing.
Major Text: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Vol. II
Authors Included: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Ernest Gaines
Other Frequently Taught Courses:
Rhetoric and Composition
Literature and Composition
American Literature Survey I
American Literature Survey II
Technical Writing
Modern Fiction
Louisiana Literature
British Literature Survey II