AML 5608 Fall 2024 - Okonkwo

This course focuses on Toni Morrison (1931-2019). A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first African American writer, indeed the first black woman, to win the Nobel Prize for literature, among her other honors, Morrison is a genius and luminary who needs little or no introduction to readers worldwide. In this seminar, we will focus on her first five novels, chronologically The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987). We will also examine these works: her short story “Recitatif,” her Nobel Lecture; The Dancing Mind, her speech on receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and her groundbreaking treatise Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. To help deepen our appreciation of Morrison’s world, politics, and art, we will place her canon in a nexus of contexts and traditions: African, African American, African American women, Caribbean, and American histories and literatures. Students are encouraged to visit the Toni Morrison Society webpage for biographical, programmatic, and archival information.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: African American Literary and Cultural Studies; Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies; a Literary Genre (Fiction). It also fulfills the Alterity requirement.