AML 2600 Fall 2024 - Montgomery

This course surveys representative works in African American Literature and Culture with a view to interrogating the conversational relationship between authors and texts during successive historical moments and across a range of literary periods. Our investigation begins with a focus on the slave narrative and symbolic acts of oral tradition and continues with a reading of texts from authors such as Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and Naylor. Not only will our readings offer an overview of major writers, texts, literary techniques, and concerns, but we will also consider how writers read and respond to each other in the construction of an established story involving the search for freedom, self-identity, and wholeness in a black Atlantic geography.