ENGL 496 - 001

Regular Academic Session

4770

Graduate

3 units

Graded

This course focuses on African-American literature over a range of periods and genres including 19th-century slave narratives (Douglass, Jacobs), the fiction and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (Hurston, Hughes, McKay) and contemporary literature (Ellison, Shange, Morrison).

Department Consent Required

Restricted to Graduate School students.

Black Queer Theory and the Literatures of Slavery In recent years, scholars of African American literature and culture have engaged gender and sexuality in ways that have challenged earlier heteropatriarchal and cishet assumptions about race, liberation, citizenship, diaspora, and identity formation and have made legible those bodies/identities that exist outside of these assumptions. Nevertheless, and as with literary studies writ large, extending gender and queer interpretive moves to pre-twentieth-century writing has remained controversial and rare. In this course, we will focus upon the literatures of slavery (i.e., nineteenth-century ex-slave autobiography, anti-slavery fiction, and twentieth-century neo-slave narratives) in order to explore how early Black writers have wrestled with the ways in which black(ened) genders and sexualities, including the seemingly cisgender embodiments and heterosexual practices of black peoples, were always already queered according to normative, post-Enlightenment racial ideologies. The goal of this course is to provide students with a range and breadth of creative and non-fiction works that ground them in the critical sexual and gender frameworks emerging from Black Studies (e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw¿s intersectionality, Hortense Spiller¿s ungendering, Roderick Ferguson¿s queer of color critique, and C. Riley Snorton¿s ¿mechanics of invention¿ of blackness and transness), as well as familiarize them with a range of authors and creative traditions from the canonical (e.g., Frederick Douglass) to the largely overlooked (e.g., Julia C. Collins, Harriet Wilson) but equally vital voices offering new perspectives, methods, and perhaps even ¿solutions.¿ This class requires department consent. Please contact Dr. Ian Cornelius at icornelius@luc.edu or (773) 508-2332 for permission.

Frederick Staidum

Tu 7:00PM - 9:30PM

01/13/2025 - 04/26/2025

In person

Lake Shore Campus

Lake Shore Campus

Closed

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