ENG 344 OF HOW IT FEELS TO BE BLACK

There has been an explosion of literary and cultural criticism that attends to the use of feelings, emotion, affects, and sentience in literature. This course will place some of these scholarly works in conversation with the work of black authors who long demonstrated an investment in representing what it feels like to be a black person in the Americas. We ask: what are the implications of sharing one’s feelings with another? We may consider works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexander Crummell, Jessie Fauset, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.