Termine im WS 2012/13 - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität ...

present.” In fact, the authors listed above are known for having sparked the first
period of “significant maturity of American writing,” known as “the American
Renaissance.” In this seminar we will study this important period in American
literature by focusing on the major issues debated in mid-nineteenth-century society
and literature. Thus the topics covered will include transcendentalism as a
nineteenth-century social and religious philosophy; gender and the “cult of true
womanhood”; race, slavery and the Civil War. Please read The Scarlet Letter
(Nathaniel Hawthorne), Benito Cereno (Herman Melville and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(Harriet Beecher Stowe) before the class starts.
Texts: Please purchase a copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature,
Seventh Edition, Volume B, 1820-1865, edited by Nina Baym (you need to make sure
that you order the right edition; it should be available through Amazon.de as well as
other distributors) or be prepared to read e-texts that are accessible through Project
Gutenberg and other online sources. Additional materials will be made available via
Moodle.
Requirements: attendance and active participation, presentation, term paper.
050 651 Dickel
The Harlem Renaissance, 4 CP
2 st. do 8.30-10 GABF 04/413 Süd
The term “Harlem Renaissance” refers to the 1920s and 30s, when, after the great
migration, many African Americans formed communities in the northern metropolises
in which art and literature flourished in an unprecedented way. In their texts, many
writers and intellectuals of the period negotiate how blackness should be represented
in literature and art. Thus, the ideas of the “talented tenth” and the “the new negro”
are put forward in Alain Locke’s seminal anthology The New Negro (1925). In order
to understand different approaches to the representation of blackness, we will read
excerpts from Locke’s anthology against its historical background and address the
response of the younger generation of Harlem Renaissance artists put forward in the
literary magazine Fire!! (1926). We will also address the philosophical context by
discussing W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness and relate African
American texts to a modernist aesthetics, which emerged at the same time. In
addition to discussing shorter texts, such as the poetry of Langston Hughes and
Claude McKay, we will address two novels, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1928) and
Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932). Near the end of our seminar we will
discuss how the period of the Harlem Renaissance is remembered in contemporary
texts and films by black artists. The requirements for a Seminar are active
participation and a term paper, those for an Übung active participation and a written
assignment.
David Lewis, ed.: The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1995).