Landscape figures prominently and powerfully in the African American literary imagination. Writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, David Bradley, and Marilyn Nelson have crafted evocative meditations on the natural world as they grapple with sobering realities of life, dramatic assertions of self, and transformative historical moments. This course will think about African American literary invocations of idealized, mythological, sacred, and knowable land and move toward a delineation of the African American pastoral aesthetic and tradition. We will read novels, poems, short stories, essays, letters, and journal entries by writers such as David Bradley, Charles Chesnutt, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Randall Kenan, Victoria Earle Matthews, Gloria Naylor, and Marilyn Nelson. |