My New Seminar for Fall 2014
This will be offered for the first time in Fall 2014 as a high-100 level seminar. I am happy to do it although it means a lot of work for me over the summer to make it accessible but not ‘easy’ and to make sure that I have a set of learning objectives in place for each and every session. I think that will come once I design the syllabus. I also want to bring in guest speakers to break up the routine. Additionally, I will try to build in some digital exercises in lieu of written responses. This is a seminar that the college needs and that I want to teach.
Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition
This seminar serves as an introduction to the works of two of the most influential and prolific African American thinkers of the post-civil rights era: James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We will explore their fiction and non-fiction as frames in which to think through representation and presentation. As social critics and novelists, both engage concepts such as structural racism, religion, trauma, sexuality, politics and history in a way that calls attention to the state of writing and narrativity as an endlessly creative act.  This class will actively consider selected novels, essays and short prose of Baldwin and Morrison in order to formulate a set of intellectual problems around ethics and aesthetics, the relation between literature and politics, and the theorization of race, gender, class, sexual difference and nation in postwar American culture and in the twenty-first century. This class is intended to prepare students for advanced work in literature and literary studies and thus emphasis on form and genre, rhetorical devices and figurative language through close readings will be part of the work of the course.