INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course aims to offer students an introduction to American history, culture, and literature, as well as to provide them with a thorough knowledge of African American literature, some of its most influential writers, its distinctive aesthetic and stylistic eclecticism, and its recurrent themes, metaphors, and motifs. Students will read foundational texts written by American and African American writers during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and they will explore the ways in which poetry, fiction, and drama have contributed to the construction and deconstruction of an American identity. Although close reading and analysis of the selected works will be the main focus of the course, due attention will be paid to the cultural and historical contexts in which each text was conceived and produced, so that students will be able to understand American and African American literary history as a significant part of modern American cultural history. Besides encountering and learning to recognize a range of different poetic, narrative, and dramatic styles, students will also examine conflicting representations of American identity, and will investigate the ways in which the different literary works connect with each other and some of their intermedial adaptations, as well as with the broader American culture and experience.

Testi d'esame:

Frederick Douglass, Narrazione della vita di Frederick Douglass, uno schiavo americano, scritta da lui stesso (1845), a cura di Maria Giulia Fabi, con testo a fronte, Venezia, Marsilio, 2015. ISBN: 978-88-317-2184-4.

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), edited by Frances Smith Foster and Richard Yarborough, New York, Norton Second Critical Edition, 2018, ISBN: 978-0393614565.

Three Negro Classics: Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, introduction by John Hope Franklin, New York, Avon Books, 1999 ISBN: 978-0380015818.

Kate Chopin, ‘Désirée’s Baby’, 1893 (available here: https://www.katechopin.org/pdfs/desirees-baby.pdf).

Angelina W. Grimké, Rachel, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991. (PDF copy provided by instructor).

Zora Neal Hurston, ‘How it Feels to Be Colored Me’, 1928 (available here: https://www.wheelersburg.net/Downloads/Hurston.pdf).

Langston Hughes, selection of poems (digital copy provided by instructor).

Langston Hughes, ‘The Blues I’m Playing’, 1934 (available here: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/english/f1124y-001/resources/blues_pbs.pdf).

James Baldwin, ‘Sonny’s Blues’, 1957 (available here: https://uwm.edu/cultures-communities/wp-content/uploads/sites/219/2018/01/SonnysBlues.Baldwin.pdf)-

August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, New York, Plume, 1985. ISBN: 978-0-452-26113-6.

Toni Morrison, Beloved, New York, Vintage Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-1400033416.

Further reading (ATTENTION!!! The following reading list will be constantly updated until the end of the course. I will be uploading more reading material on MOODLE as the weeks go by):

Cristina Iuli e Paola Loreto, La letteratura degli Stati Uniti. Dal Rinascimento americano ai nostri giorni, Roma, Carocci, 2017. [Capitolo 1: Leonardo Buonomo, ‘Dichiarazioni di indipendenza: I grandi classici dell’Ottocento’, pp. 13-48. Capitolo 3: Sonia Di Loreto, ‘La slave narrative e l’abolizionismo atlantico’, pp. 69-90.] (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Declaration of Independence (1776)
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=2&page=transcript

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

The Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=9&page=transcript

President George Washington’s First Inaugural Speech (1789)
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/content.php?flash=false&page=milestone

Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Emancipation Proclamation’ (1863)
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=34

Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Gettysburg Address’ (1863)
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=36

Abraham Lincoln, ‘Second Inaugural Address’ (1865)
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=38

M. Giulia Fabi, ‘Introduzione’, in Frederick Douglass, Narrazione della vita di Frederick Douglass, uno schiavo americano, scritta da lui stesso (1845), a cura di Maria Giulia Fabi, con testo a fronte, Venezia, Marsilio, 2015, pp. 9-34.

Frances Smith Foster and Richard Yarborough, ‘Introduction’, in Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), edited by Frances Smith Foster and Richard Yarborough, New York, Norton Second Critical Edition, 2018, pp. vii-xix.

Sara Antonelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Harriet Jacobs, Vita di una ragazza schiava, Roma, Donzelli, 2004. (PDF copy provided by the instructor)
W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘A Little Negro Theatre’, «The Crisis» XXII (1926). (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Baraka, Amiri. “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture.” Black Music Research Journal 11. 2 (1991): 101-09. (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Carby, Hazel V. “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” The Jazz Cadence of American Literature. Ed. Robert G. O’Meally. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Gussow, Adam. “Blues Literature.” New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Literature. Ed. T. M. Thomas Inge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 44-51. (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Salaam, Kalamu Ya. “The Blues Aesthetic.” What is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self. Chicago: Third World Press, 1994. 7-20. (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Scheiber, Andrew. “Blues Narratology and the African American Novel.” New Essays on the African American Novel. Eds. Lovalerie King and Linda F. Seltzer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. (PDF copy provided by the instructor).

Toni Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’, 1987 (PDF copy provided by the instructor).