FYWS 151-01, Dark Penmanship: African Americans and Writing, Fall 2014

Abstract

In writing, “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes,” Frederick Douglass captures the perverse relationship(s) African Americans maintained with the act of writing. “Dark Penmanship” is a course designed to expose the first-year student to the intricacies of critical writing/reading through a creative surveying of African American writers and the ways in which they composed their narratives for a larger American readership.