English 149 - Winter, 2013

Topics in Literature

Topic: Lady Sings the Blues: Blues, Literature, & Black Feminism

Class Information

Instructor: Heard Mollel, Danielle
CRN: 52748
Time: TR 3:10-4:30
Location: 101 Olson

Description

Lady Sings the Blues: Blues, Literature, and Black Feminism

This course examines a long tradition of feminist articulations in black women’s blues expressed in sound and literature over the course of the twentieth century. By bringing together black women writers, thinkers, and songstresses such as Gayl Jones, Bessie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday, we will become familiar with the recurrent tropes of black women’s blues and how these coalesce in a feminism based on the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. By the end of the course, we will find that amidst stories of abandonment, battery, unrequited love, passion, sexual desire, depression, jealousy, poverty, natural disaster, homelessness, wandering, loss, racism, shadism, and self-destruction, black women’s blues above all names a will to survive, carves a space to be heard, and calls into being a community and a struggle based on shared experiences. Throughout the quarter we will engage equally in listening to music and reading blues literature. On this note, we will actively consider the musical qualities of the novels, plays, and poems that we read at the same time that we consider the literary aspects of the blues we hear. Each unit will be accompanied by supplemental readings from cultural theorists such as Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, bell hooks, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and others in order to build a critical framework for interpreting, historicizing, and theorizing black women’s blues.

Grading

35% Midterm paper—5-7 pages
40% Final Paper—7-10 pages
25% Regular Participation





Texts

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Corregidora, Gayl Jones
The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
Jazz, Toni Morrison
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
Quicksand and Passing, Nella Larsen