2015-2016 Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2015-2016 Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

LIT 077 CM - Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston

This course considers the conflicting aesthetics of two prominent black American writers of the mid-20th century. As an expositor of literary naturalism, Wright composed a fiction redolent of racial protest. In best-selling works like Native Son and Black Boy he portrayed what he once called the “essential bleakness of black life in America.” Hurston, on the other hand, employed her formal study of anthropology to render a vernacular fiction that celebrates the complexity of black folk traditions. Through close readings of their major works (both fiction and non-fiction, novel and short form) and consideration of their shifting critical reception, we shall seek a clearer sense of how Wright and Hurston differ, what they share, and where they fit in the broader scope of American literature.

Offered: Every other year

Credit: 1

Course Number: LIT 077 CM