English 603.09 The American Slave Narrative: Visions and Revisions

Instructor: Faye Halpern

This half-year course will examine the different ways American writers have represented "the peculiar institution" in the 19th-century and today. We will look at nineteenth-century American slave narratives not as documents to be evaluated according to their historical accuracy but as persuasive texts trying to make certain understandings of race and injustice commonsensical. How did different authors represent the crime of slavery and how do contemporary literary critics make sense of their representations? We'll end the course by considering some contemporary fictional revisions of these slave narratives. What has changed over time and what do those changes reveal about the way people have come to understand the crime of American slavery? The course will give its participants a sense of the historical trajectory of the American slave narrative, as well as an introduction to the criticism surrounding this genre and nineteenth-century American literature more generally. This course will also examine what goes into making a good critical argument with the aim of having its participants enact that advice in their own writing for the course.

Possible Primary Texts

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman's Narrative

William Lloyd Garrison, Excerpts from "The Liberator"

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno"

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose

Edward P. Jones, The Known World

Valerie Martin, Property

Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner

Excerpts from Willian Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond

Documentary: "Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,"

Possible Critical Texts

Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey

Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture

Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American

Literature and Culture

James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel"

Robert Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity