Index#: 07586
Will Count Towards English MAJOR
Will Count Towards English MINOR
This course shall explore the twentieth-and twenty-first-century African American essay traditions by a representative number of the best-known African American essayists in the US: W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Ta-nehisi Coates. We shall pay close attention to the aesthetics and politics of form associated with the modern essay, especially it’s development out of oratorical beginnings. What is the status of the essay as a polemical and literary form in African American expressive culture? What is the relationship of the essay form to race, class and gender? Who gets to write an essay, in other words? More significantly, we shall study a several uses of the African American essay, including protest, memoir, homage, cultural history, criticism, and very occasionally, belle lettres. We shall treat the essays under our study as foundational to our own efforts to marshal the essay form to present-day purposes. The higher aim of the course is to produce a body of critical and historically-informed student essays worthy of print or online publication. Primary readings include The Souls of Black Folks (Dubois), Shadow and Act (Ellison), Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), The Sanctified Church (Hurston), In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (Walker) and Between the World and Me (Coates). Supplemental readings are likely to include essays by June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Claudia Rankine. Weekly writing exercises, a midterm paper (6-8 pages), and a final essay (8-12 page) will be required. This course honors the life and work of the late Cheryl A. Wall, formerly the Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her last book On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, was published in 2018.
About Professor Wallace
Maurice Wallace is associate professor of English at Rutgers. His fields of expertise include African American literature and cultural studies, nineteenth-century American literature, the history and representation of American slavery, and gender studies. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, a book on the history of black manhood in African American letters and culture, and is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of a volume of scholarly articles on early photography and African American identity entitled Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African-American Identity. Professor Wallace has served on the editorial boards for American Literature and Yale Journal of Criticism and is a contributing editor to James Baldwin Review. His current research and writing agendas include a monograph on the religious life and leanings of Frederick Douglass, and a critical exploration into the sound of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice. Professor Wallace also teaches in areas of visual culture and sound studies.