ENGL 319 - Race and its Metaphors

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as AFRS 319) Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year. Seth Cosimini.

Topic for 2024/25b: Toni Morrison’s American Literature. In her now classic lecture “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison charges literary scholars to conduct an “examination and reinterpretation of the American canon, the founding nineteenth-century works, for the ‘unspeakable things unspoken’; for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature. A search, in other words, for the ghost in the machine.” Consider this course a séance for this ghost in the machine of nineteenth-century American literature. We examine nineteenth-century works that were used to found American literary history and method alongside newer additions to this canon to understand the intersecting histories of racial terror, settler colonialism, patriarchal violence, and imperialism that haunt them, and our literature since. In doing so, we emerge not only with a strong understanding of the works that define the nineteenth-century American literary canon but the preoccupying questions of Black Studies and Critical Race Studies in our contemporary moment. Seth Cosimini.

This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS