ENL-946 - Harlem Renaissance Essays, Poems, Novels

Course Description

Harlem Renaissance: Essays, Poems, Novels | Explore the Harlem Renaissance through at-home readings and in-class discussions of essays, poems and novels that marked a blossoming of expression by African American and Caribbean writers in the early 1900s. We’ll encounter Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson. W. E. B. DuBois, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Note: Senior Cycle fee class. Students must be 55 years or older by start date in order to enroll in this class.

Learner Outcomes

Examine through reading and discussion the literary texts that constitute some of the major and most influential writing of the Harlem Renaissance; Recognize the individual pursuits, obsessions, viewpoints, struggles, and proposals of creative people who have a story to tell and an argument to make; Consider that no monolithic ideology or stylistic standard defined the creative period; Rediscover voices that may have been overlaid by time, and refresh our American story; Explore the geographic boundaries of the word “Harlem” and ask what it represents: a neighborhood, a refuge, a state of mind, a beacon; Distinguish the nuances of the word “Renaissance” and ask what was being reborn, renewed, rekindled, resurrected.