ENGL 151-04, First Year Writing Seminar: African Americans and the Daring to Write, Fall 2012

Abstract

This is a WRITING INTENSIVE course that approaches the act and art of writing from a nuanced survey of the African American literary tradition from Phillis Wheatley through the New Negro Renaissance. This course will survey the perverse relationship(s) African Americans maintained with the act of writing and how, despite varying degrees/types of education, they were forced to approach the discipline of writing in very different ways. Dark Penmanship is a course designed to expose the first-year student to the intricacies of critical writing and reading through a creative surveying of African American writers and the ways in which they composed themselves and their narratives for a larger American readership. By examining authors from Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass to Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois, students will explore a variety of rhetorical/compositional strategies beneficial for humanistic, scientific, political and artistic writing.