ENGL 363 - Gaines, Morrison, Wideman: Textualizing Orality and Literacy

FC ARHU CD WINT

4 credits
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong outlined a theory about changes in human thought processes that result from developments in speech, writing, and print. Beginning with this classic study, this course will focus closely on three contemporary novelists who continue the African American tradition’s own “play” between writing and orality. Examining Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman, we will study their post-Civil Rights (paradoxically) textual experiments in re-configuring and re-presenting “the black interior.”