LIT 499-07 Tracing the Trope of Epiphanal Blackness
Professor: Williams
Meetings: Thursday 5:30pm-8:20pm
I employ the term “epiphanal blackness” to define the moment when what it means to be black is textually revealed throughout African American literature. The complicated ideas of race operating in the United States and the “notions” we hold about the meaning of race, both shape and are shaped by these textual moments. The moments when the writers and/or their characters first recognize that their race – perhaps embodied in skin or merely in notions of “blood”- has deep meaning in the context of American identity are ubiquitous in prominent texts in the African American literary canon. This course will explore the contradictions and ambiguities which become fundamental to the way race is conceived: blacks are seen and understood as different, while in their minds they know they also alike, as American, or at least human, but in any event shut out from the dominant society. It is this trope of “epiphanal blackness” and its subsequent implications for the construction of racial identity that we will trace in fiction, autobiography and poetry in the canon of African American/Black literature.
In addition, we will place the study of the trope of “epiphanal blackness” in the context of African American literary theory. Our theoretical readings for this course will help us trace the trope of “epiphanal blackness” in its many thematic manifestations, exploring how spatial geographies, violence, and the constructions of whiteness reveal what it means to be black.
A number of contemporary writers and thinkers are invested in the complex interpretation of blackness as both an idea as well as a lived reality and it is this more complex rendering of black identity and thought that informs the theoretical work we will focus on during the semester.
In this course, students will be expected to research and investigate the critical debate that has surrounded African American literature and theory over the last twenty years. Students will be expected to do two, interrelated things in this course: to contribute actively and thoughtfully to class discussions of assigned materials, and to devote the bulk of their time to the formulation of their own research project on African American literature and theory.