ENG 352 WRITING EMPATHY/BLACK LIFE

WRITING EMPATHY/BLACK LIFE

At the end of the nineteenth century, amid legalized segregation and widespread racism, U.S. black writers undertook radical experiments in literary art. Students will read works by Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Ida B. Wells, considering their strategies to inspire readers’ empathy and to shape new possibilities in black life. The course ends with a discussion of how conceptions of empathy in the present moment influence black writing, in works such as Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (2017).