search for an essay in our archive events | about us | for students | home

Spring, 2007

English 559 E (Seminar in Afro-American Literature)
After the Harlem Renaissance
back to courses

Prof. William J. Maxwell
1:00-2:50 p.m. on Wednesdays
123 English Bldg 
CRN: 39298

Historian Rayford Logan famously labeled the thirty years following the betrayal of southern Reconstruction as the “nadir” of African-American politics.  Had Logan been a literary critic, he might have joined his peers in locating a modern nadir in African-American writing between the collapse of the Harlem Renaissance and the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, an interregnum variously identified with “protest literature,” “proletarian literature,” “social realism,” the “School of Richard Wright,” the “Chicago Renaissance” and, to cite the bewildering compound effort of the _Norton Anthology_, “Realism, Naturalism, Modernism.”  This seminar aims to reopen the case of a low ebb ironically full of antagonistic highlights, Wright’s _Native Son_ (1940) and Zora Neale Hurston’s _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ (1937) included.  Among other things, it will examine the uncertain self-periodization of a literature awaiting the reacceleration of historical time.  How did African-American writing from the early 1930s to the early 1950s itself conceive of its belatedness, its exile from the open modernity of the New Negro vogue?  How did texts from Wallace Thurman’s end-of-Renaissance _Infants of the Spring_ (1932) to Ralph Ellison’s end-of-segregation _Invisible Man_ (1952) figure a whole series of post-Renaissance “afters,” some of them surprisingly pertinent in the short, anxious twenty-first century: after race; after identity; after visibility; after primitivism; after cosmopolitanism; after free-market prosperity; after high modernism, historical avant gardism, and classical bohemianism?  The reading list will contain the titles mentioned above, and works by some combination of William Attaway, James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.  The seminar should best serve students interested in an advanced introduction to (1) African-American prose and poetry in the mid-twentieth century; (2) the intellectual history of the Great Depression and its echoes in the 1940s and ’50s; and (3) the relations among historical fictions, historical materialisms, and literary-historical methods.