LIT 4013 – Spring 2027 – Okonkwo

Leasing its title "Mythic Black Fiction" from Jane Campbell's book of the same name, this course contemplates John B. Vickery's observation that "The history of literature everywhere attests to the closeness and complexity of the relation between literature and myth," a relationship evident in "their shared traits of narrative, character, image and theme." Antebellum and postbellum African American literature discloses earlier black writers' mythic consciousness. It is twentieth- through twenty-first-century African American novelists, however, that have taken that sensibility to new heights. They have inverted history, disintegrated time, re-lived an aborted slave insurrection, supplicated a trickster god of the crossroad, pitted an infernal, Eugenicist spirit against an ageless shape-shifter/Earth mother, borrowed the schematic of Dante's hell, and featured a navel-less woman, flying Africans, and a child born with a caul, among other (im)probables. But is there really another reason black writers are so strongly drawn to myth? The answer is yes, according to Jacqueline de Weever: "The experiences of black people in the New World, into which they have been forcibly thrust against their will, cannot be [fully] told or treated in realistic or naturalistic traditions in which much of American literature has been cast--the pain of the results of three centuries of oppression is too great to be faced and confronted in a realistic mode. Such an experience demands another mode for which mythic narrative is more appropriate." We will engage with the mythopoesis, the mythmaking imperative, in six, representative African American novels.