Literature in Times of Change: The Case of Reconstruction

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How can a nation rebuild after being ripped apart by extreme polarization? What happens when a group of people who have been excluded from a national project seek to join that national project on equal footing? And what is the role for writers, musicians, and intellectuals in these projects of national transformation? In this upper-level seminar, we’ll do a deep dive into American literature of the Reconstruction era. Reconstruction formally lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until the Compromise of 1877, but its attendant political and social effects—and the ramifications of the project’s undermining and abandonment—continued to shape American life, especially for African Americans, for many more years, and in the literature of the period, writers explored and experimented with what role literature could play in times of massive political and cultural flux. We will read novels and poetry by writers including Francis E.W. Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline E. Hopkins, and Albion Tourgee, alongside works by the major Black intellectuals of the period—Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Du Bois—and more recent critical assessments by literary scholars including Saidiya Hartman and Hazel Carby. Coursework will include a robust reading load, required in-class presentations, seminar papers, reading responses, and original research.