English 311.01 (13471): The History of African-American Writing Fall 2015 Tuesday, Thursday 11:00-12:15 JR 244 Professor Nate Millsnathaniel.mills@csun.eduOffice hours: Tuesdays 1:00-3:30 and by appointmentSierra Tower 718 | Course Description / Objectives
Through a historical survey of the work of major African-American writers from slavery to the present, this course will examine the defining features of African-American expression. The course is organized around a foundational question: what makes African-American literature African-American? Is it just a set of texts that happen to have been written by authors who identified as black in their respective historical moments? Are there distinct formal and thematic paradigms that unify these texts into a coherent literary tradition? What relation do black texts bear to other black texts, as well as to the Western canon? Are African-American texts necessarily “political,” by definition protesting the social and political marginalization of black people in America? Do African-American texts represent the particular experiences of African Americans, or do they (also?) address universal problems and experiences?

The cultural, literary-formal, and political distinctiveness of African-American writing will thus be the guiding theme of this course’s rigorous, fast-moving survey.

Additionally, students in 311 will acquire knowledge of the following:

* The ways African-American writers have negotiated the tensions, contradictions, or harmonies between African and American identities within the experiences of African-American subjects in various historical periods. * The strategies employed by African-American literary and sociopolitical texts to analyze and protest racist and economic oppression, as well as racial and sexual violence, in various historical periods. * The ways African-American texts have addressed gender and class-based differences within the African-American population, and have analyzed the interplay of gender, class, sexuality, and race in shaping African-American experience. * The historical events that have shaped African-American writing. * The major genres and movements of African-American literary history.

As 311 is a Writing Intensive and Information Competence Course, students will also practice:

* The conventions of academic writing and argumentation in the field of English. * The process of academic research and the effective incorporation of secondary sources in academic writing in the field of English.

As 311 is a course that satisfies the Comparative Cultural Studies Subject Exploration component of General Education (GE) at CSUN, students will be able to:

* Describe and explain how race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, sexuality and other markers of social identity impact life experiences and social relations. * Analyze and explain the deleterious impact and privileges sustained by racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, homophobia, religious intolerance or stereotyping on all sectors of society.

This section of English 311 fulfills requirements for the GE Social Justice Path and meets the following Path objectives:

* Students will be able to compare the distinct definitions of social justice. * Students will be able to identify and analyze the ways injustices are institutionalized in social, political, and economic structures.

This section of English 311 fulfills requirements for the GE Arts, Media, and Culture Path and meets the following Path objectives:

* Students will be able to define aesthetics, media, culture and their interconnections. * Students will be able to analyze and write about various artistic, literary, intellectual, and other works of culture with appropriate theoretical concepts

Required Texts (available at university bookstore; other texts available on Moodle)

Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – Dover: 978-0486284996
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk – Dover: 978-0486280417
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God – Harper Perennial: 0060838671
Richard Wright, Native Son (abridged 1940 edition) – Harper Perennial: 006053348X
*Please be sure to get the original 1940 or “abridged” edition of Native Son. This is harder to locate than the newer, restored edition more commonly stocked in bookstores.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time – Vintage: 978-0679744726
Toni Morrison, Sula – Vintage: 978-1400033430

Assignments and Grading

Weekly Responses: 40%
Micro-Exams: 40%
Annotated Bibliography: 20%

How Your Grade is Computed: The grades for all assignments are distributed as letter grades. In calculating your final grades or grade averages, letter grades are converted to a numerical average of that letter grade range. The averages of each letter grade, and the numerical range for that letter grade, will be as follows:
A+ = 100
A = 97 (95-99) C+ = 78 (77-79) D- = 61 (60-62)
A- = 93 (90-94) C = 74 (73-76) F = 50 or 0*
B+ = 88 (87-89) C- = 71 (70-72)
B = 84 (83-86) D+ = 68 (67-69)
B- = 81 (80-82) D = 64 (63-66)

*zero is reserved for assignments never turned in or, in some cases, plagiarized assignments.

When calculating your final letter grade for the course, your numerical grade is rounded up to the next whole number if it has a decimal value greater than .5 and if the rounding up would put you in the next highest grade bracket (i.e., if you earned a 89.6, your grade would be an A-; if you earned a 73.9, you would still receive a grade of C).
Weekly Responses
For each Tuesday class meeting, you will prepare a 1-2 page (1 page is the minimum length, 2 pages is the maximum length) critical response to the assigned reading/s for that class period. In your response, you will put forth your own succinct idea, claim, or assertion about the reading/s. Some weeks I will provide a prompt or explicit direction for your response (either in class, or via email/Moodle), other weeks I will leave the focus of your response up to you. Your response should do the following:

* Demonstrate that you’ve read the text/s carefully, followed any relevant lecture material or in-class conversation, and adhered to any specific directions provided by me for your response.

* Clearly articulate your own original, insightful claim about a specific aspect of the text/s in question. Your response must convey your own substantial opinion of the text. In other words, you need to do more than claim that you liked or didn’t like the readings, and you need to avoid merely summarizing their surface-level content. Your response has to offer your own ideas, concerns, analyses of hidden meanings, and interpretations of important issues or passages in the text/s. With only 1-2 pages to work with, you aren’t expected to construct a fully-comprehensive or conclusive argument, but you should provide a plausible, thought-provoking, and original perspective on the text/s that isn’t already obvious to a reader of the text/s.

* Use concrete references to the text/s, and clear and concise argumentative reasoning, to support your claim and ideas.

Who are you writing for? As you draft your response, it will help to visualize your hypothetical reader. You’re writing for a senior, straight-A student enrolled in this section of English 311. This student has read every text assigned in the course so far, and attended every class meeting. Your response should offer this reader a potentially original (perhaps provocative) insight, understanding, or perspective about the session’s text/s, one that he/she arguably won’t already know or possess simply by having done the assigned reading or taken careful notes in class.

Your responses are graded on a 3-point scale: Excellent (2 points), Satisfactory (1 point), and Unsatisfactory (0 points). Your responses are evaluated according to the following general rubric:

Excellent (2 points): The response demonstrates that the author has carefully read the assigned text/s and has clearly expressed an original interpretation, insight, or perspective about the text/s. It responds to any specific directions and prompts. It makes a bold and interesting claim, one that isn’t already obvious and that spurs the curiosity and intellectual engagement of the reader. It goes beyond a summary of the surface-level meaning of the text/s and offers deeper insight. It backs up its claims and renders them plausible with evidence and sound reasoning. It is free from major errors in spelling or grammar.

Satisfactory (1 point): The response demonstrates that the author has carefully read the assigned text/s and offers an interpretation, perspective, or claim about them. Typically, the response will fall short of an original analysis, offer claims or ideas that are in part already obvious, and/or fail to respond in full to specific directions or prompts. It may offer ideas that are not fully thought out and/or not plausible. It may demonstrate minor misreadings of the assigned text/s and/or misunderstandings of contextual information. It may lack sufficient evidence or justification for its claims, and/or be at times unclear in its reasoning and logic. It may contain frequent small errors in grammar and spelling, or multiple major errors.

Unsatisfactory (0 points): The response fails in one or more of the following ways: it does not demonstrate that the author has carefully read the assigned text/s; it makes little or no specific reference to the assigned text/s; its ideas are not clearly expressed, are entirely obvious to the reader, and/or are based on serious misreadings of the assigned text/s and/or misunderstandings of contextual information; it neglects important instructions and prompts specific to the response. It may come far short of the 1-page minimum length, or far exceed the 2-page maximum, or reveal no engagement with the assigned reading/s at all. In addition, it may have serious and/or frequent errors in grammar and spelling that obstruct the clarity of the prose.

Responses must be double-spaced, typed, with 1” margins on all sides and in a standard 12-point font. Do not include anything in the heading of your response except your name and the week number on the same line, separated by a slash (i.e., “Jane Doe / Week 6”). Do not include any extra spaces between your name and the start of your response. Responses that don’t meet formatting requirements—that have larger margins, or include extra information in the heading—will be penalized.

Responses are due in class each Tuesday, and must submitted in hard copy. Electronic submissions are not accepted under any circumstances. You cannot submit a response if you are absent for the class meeting for which it is due, and you cannot submit a response after the class meeting on which it is due. Each week, we will use these responses to generate topics for class discussion, to identify passages and issues that we want to address as a class, and to organize the focus of lecture material.

Responses will be due starting Week 2 (the XX Tuesday class meeting). There will thus be a total of 15 responses for which you can receive credit. Your final grade for responses will be calculated according to the number of points your total responses receive by the end of the semester:

16 points: A+ 14-15: A 13: A- 11-12: B+ 9-10: B 8: B-

7: C+ 6: C 5: C-

3-4: D 1-2: F/50 0: F/0

The grade scale is based, hypothetically, on 8 responses receiving full credit. This scale is designed to allow you to miss responses if you need to accommodate your schedule, as well as to give you leeway in case you have to miss a Tuesday class period for an emergency or other reason. For this reason, you are not allowed to “make up” or do extra credit for missed or unsatisfactory responses. You are welcome to submit as many responses (1 per week, up to 15) as you’d like, but 16 is the maximum score you can receive.

Throughout the semester, I strongly encourage you to, if necessary, seek my feedback on how to improve your writing by meeting with me during office hours.

Micro-Exams
At 5 points during the semester (see the course calendar), we’ll have a 20-minute exam. This will consist of four short-answer questions about our course readings and issues and information discussed in class. You may use your notes for these exams (but no laptops—if you take notes by laptop, you must print them out on exam days). Each exam can cover all material assigned and discussed in the course up to that point, but will focus on material introduced since the last exam.
Each exam consists of 4 questions, worth 2 points (fully correct) or 1 point (partially correct) each. Your grade on the exam will then be determined as following:
8: points: A+, 100
7: A, 97

6: B+, 88
5: B, 84

4: C+, 78
3: C, 74

2: D+, 68
1: D, 64

0: F, 0

At the end of the semester, your lowest micro-exam grade will be dropped. Your remaining 4 exams will be averaged to determine this component of your final course grade.

If you miss class on a micro-exam date or come to class late and miss the exam, you will receive a zero for that exam. The reason one of your lowest exam scores is dropped is precisely to accommodate an unavoidable absence, and not to give you the chance to just “skip” one exam. So keep this “free” exam in reserve in case you need to miss class—whether for an emergency or not—on a micro-exam date. Except in the rarest of circumstances, you are not allowed to make up a missed exam.

Annotated Bibliography
You will compile an annotated bibliography of academic secondary sources pertaining to any two of the primary texts read for the course. You will locate two academic secondary sources that discuss each primary text, and provide annotations—including an MLA works-cited entry, a summary, and an evaluation—for each. This will require you to conduct research into literary scholarship using the library’s resources, to discern appropriate academic secondary sources, to master the MLA format for citing secondary sources, and to summarize and evaluate each source’s main argument. See the “Annotated Bibliography: Guidelines for Academic Research and MLA Format” document, available on Moodle, for specific instructions on completing this assignment.

Your bibliography is due no later than the last week of class, but may be submitted at any point in the semester.

Each of your annotations must be grouped under the primary text to which it pertains. Each of your annotation must contain the following, with each worth a certain number of points.

1) The source must be an academic secondary source as defined by the specific terms of the “Guidelines” document, and the source must be about a primary text we’ve read in the course. (1 point)

2) Using the resources provided in the “Guidelines” document, you must provide a works-cited entry for the source in correct MLA format. (1 point) 3) You must provide a 100-150 word summary of the source’s main argument. You must identify and summarize the specific, original and unique claim the source is making—not its general content or topic. In other words, what assertion is the source making about the primary text that is unique to the source itself? What is the source arguing? Do not simply recount or rehash the entire source content. Rather, convey in your own words what the source’s author is positing as the contribution he or she is making to academic analyses of the primary text. (2 points)

4) You must provide a 150-250 word evaluation of the source’s argument. How plausible or convincing is the interpretation or argument being put forth by this source? What specific aspects of the primary text does it illuminate or cause you to read in a new way? How, exactly, does it enhance your understanding of the primary text? If it fails to do this, what’s the cause of that failure? Do not simply critique the author’s writing style or essay organization: you’re evaluating the substance of the source’s argument, not the way it was written. Furthermore, do not simply describe the source’s claim as interesting or original—you must explain why it’s interesting or original. (2 points)

Both 3 and 4 must be in your own words. Do not quote from the source you’re annotating unless you’re introducing key terms or brief phrases created by the source’s author. If you must reproduce the language of the source itself in order to clearly convey its content, you must quote that language properly. Be careful not to describe the source’s ideas in language that resembles or approximates that of the source itself. Presenting directly-quoted material without designating it as a quotation, and paraphrasing a source in language similar to the source’s own, are both considered plagiarism. See the “Guidelines” document for more details.

Each of your annotations is worth 6 points, with the total assignment thus being worth 24 points. Your grade on the assignment is determined using the following scale:

24 points: A+ 22-23: A 20-1: A- 17-19: B+ 15-16: B 13-14: B-

10-12: C+ 8-9: C 6-7: C-

3-5: D 1-2: F/50 0: F/0

Attendance and Participation
Consistent attendance and in-class participation are vital to your success in the course. I expect you to attend each class session, participate in class conversations, and take careful notes. This will enable you to perform well on weekly responses, micro-exams, and your annotated bibliography. Furthermore, I will frequently provide specific directions for responses, details about assignments, and possible changes to the course calendar in class.

At the end of the semester, students who have attended regularly (missed no more than 2 class meetings) and have been consistent, prepared, enthusiastic, and productive contributors to all in-class discussions and activities, will receive a 5-point bonus to their final grade (i.e., an 89 to a 94, or an 81 to an 86). This bonus is intended to reward exemplary participation and is granted only occasionally.

If you miss more than 4 class periods, you will receive a 1-point deduction to your final grade for each absence past the fourth. For the sake of determining attendance, arriving to class more than 15 minutes late will be counted as an absence (and applied toward the grade penalty). Three instances of arriving under 15 minutes late will together count as an absence. Similarly, one instance of leaving class more than 15 minutes early, or three instances of leaving under 15 minutes early, will count as an absence.

Please contact me ASAP if you have any concerns about your attendance.

Offensive and Uncomfortable Content

All of the works we’ll be reading in this course are in some way about race in America. Many of them deal very frankly with racism, racist language, racial oppression, and racial violence. Furthermore, because race, gender, and sexuality are intertwined sociopolitical and personal issues, some of these texts deal with explicit sexuality, sexism, and sexual violence. These are all very sensitive issues that you will be expected to discuss in class and to write about in your papers. As a result, we must all treat this content with sensitivity and with extra-careful self-awareness. You must also be prepared to encounter some potentially uncomfortable material in the course readings, and be willing to analyze and think critically about that material. If you have any concerns about this matter, please let me know.

Recording Devices

Please do not use any devices to record class lectures and discussions, unless you have a documented accommodation that would require it. If you do require such an accommodation, be sure to let me know at the start of the semester.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the most serious academic offense and is treated accordingly. Plagiarizing an assignment may result in you receiving no credit on that assignment. Additionally, it may cause you to automatically fail the course, and may lead to further punitive action. For a useful website that offers advice on avoiding plagiarism as well as the CSUN policy on plagiarism, see: http://library.csun.edu/Guides/ResearchStrategies/AvoidingPlagiarism
Cell Phone and Laptop Use
Unless you need to have your phone on for an emergency possibility, please turn off your cell phone before entering class.
You may use laptops to take notes during class provided your use doesn’t interfere with the class or distract you or others from actively participating in discussion and/or following lectures and presentations. If I feel that your use of a laptop is counterproductive to classroom discussion or activity, I may ask you to refrain from using it. Laptops must be turned off during micro-exams.
Religious Accommodations
If you have to miss class or need to make other arrangements for a religious holiday, please let me know as soon as possible.
Disability Accommodations
If you have a disability and need accommodations, please register with the Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) office or the National Center on Deafness (NCOD). The DRES office is located in Bayramian Hall, room 110 and can be reached at (818) 677-2684. NCOD is located on Bertrand Street in Jeanne Chisholm Hall and can be reached at (818) 677-2611. If you would like to discuss your need for accommodations with me, please contact me to set up an appointment.

COURSE CALENDAR
1. All readings and assignments must be completed prior to the class period for which they are assigned.
2. All selections are from the required course texts. Selections marked with an asterisk are available as PDF files on the Moodle site.

Week 1: DEFINING AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITING 8/25
Introductions

8/27 George Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926)*
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926)*
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Trope of the Talking Book” from The Signifying Monkey (1988)*

Week 2: SLAVERY AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITING
9/1
Phillis Wheatley, Preface to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), “To Maecenas,” “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North-America, Etc.” (1773), Letter to Samson Occom (1774)*

9/3 Continue Discussions

Week 3 9/8
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)

9/10
Continue Discussions

Week 4: POST-EMANCIPATION BLACK EXPRESSION 9/15 MICRO-EXAM 1
Booker T. Washington, from Up from Slavery (1901)* 9/17 Continue Discussions

Week 5
9/22
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

9/24
Du Bois, Souls

Week 6
9/29
Du Bois, Souls

10/1
MICRO-EXAM 2
Academic Secondary Source Exercise: Dickson D. Bruce Jr., “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness”*

Week 7: THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE: MODERNITY, POLITICS, POETRY, AND THE BLUES 10/6
Marcus Garvey, “Africa for the Africans” (1923)*
A. Philip Randolph, “Garveyism” (1921)*
Alain Locke, “The New Negro” (1925)*

10/8 Claude McKay, “If We Must Die” (1919), “America” (1921)*

Week 8 10/13
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921), “The Weary Blues” (1925), “Red Silk Stockings” (1927)*
Gwendolyn Bennett, “To a Dark Girl” (1927)*
W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues” (1914)* Ma Rainey, “Prove It on Me Blues” (1928)*

10/15
MICRO-EXAM 3
Continue Discussions

Week 9: HURSTON, WRIGHT, AND THE MODERN BLACK NOVEL 10/20
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

10/22 Hurston, Their Eyes

Week 10 10/27
Hurston, Their Eyes

10/29 Hurston, Their Eyes

Week 11
11/3
MICRO-EXAM 4
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

11/5 Wright, Native Son

Week 12 11/10
Wright, Native Son 11/12 Wright, Native Son

Week 13: CIVIL RIGHTS, BLACK POWER, and BLACK ARTS 11/17 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

11/19 Continue Discussions

Week 14
11/24
Amiri Baraka, “Black Art” (1969)*
Nikki Giovanni, “For Saundra,” “Beautiful Black Men,” “Nikki-Rosa” (1968)

11/26 No Class: Thanksgiving Break

Week 15 12/1 Toni Morrison, Sula (1973) 12/3 Morrison, Sula

Week 16 12/8 MICRO-EXAM 5
Morrison, Sula (1973)