College Catalog 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
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LARTS 382 — African American Literature – The World and Works of Toni Morrison3 credits
Spring
Renée Baron
In describing what propelled the former book editor to write her first novel at the age of 39, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This semester, we will read and discuss that book, The Bluest Eye, and the subsequent works that Morrison added to the American literary canon, including Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby, and selected later novels, such as Beloved. We will appraise Morrison’s essays and her collaboration with Richard Danielpour on the opera Margaret Garner and examine major influences on her work, including William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. Throughout the semester, we will consider the cultural and literary significance of Morrison’s oeuvre while investigating the socio-political context of her work and the literary world to which she responded.
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