ENGL 6495

Black Aesthetics in the Long Nineteenth Century

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

This course will examine the development of a self-conscious black aesthetic and literary criticism in the long 19th century, beginning with Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1793) and ending with W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903).  We will give special attention to form (particularly seriality), black performance (through the Colored Conventions movement) and affect (through black religious traditions). How have print culture methodologies and changing understandings of the "archive" changed the way we construct African American literary histories? What is the relation between black artists and Western aesthetics, a tradition that remains hostile to black expressive culture? In that sense, we will simultaneously probe early black aesthetic discourse and situate it within and against aesthetic discourse(s) more broadly.

When Offered Spring.

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