*this class will consider the Harlem Renaissance in the larger context of the literary flowering of the 1920s. Reports will focus on Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty and James DeJongh, Vicious Modernism. See Handouts Literature/Art of the 1920s and Harlem Renaissance.
 
Introduction: changing interpretations/evaluations of the Harlem Renaissance (see earlier handout on African American thought/protest)
 
1. As continuation of prewar concern with social problems and social injustice J.H. Franklin, From Freedom to slavery
 
2. As crisis is of middle class (with emphasis on similarities between white and black writers)

Bone, Robert, The Negro novel in America (1968) [ S McCabe PS153.N5 B6 1968 c.]
Fullinwider, S.P. The Mind and mood of Black America
Huggins, Nathan I. Harlem Renaissance (New York : Oxford, 1971) [NX512.3.N5] e.g. p. 8-9 on common identity crisis faced by white and black writers.
 
3. Postmodernist/multicultural reassessments
 
a. Baker, Houston A., Modernism and the Harlem renaissance (1987); and his
Afro-American Poetics; revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic
(Madison: U. Wisconsin] [PS153.N5 B22 1988]
 
b. Douglas, Terrible Honesty
 
 
ASSESSMENTS. Prior to recent evaluation of Houston Baker et al, critics tended to see the HR as not successful: failure to make contact with Black masses (Bone); as yieding to personal despair (Fullinwider) or false "primitivism" (Huggins). Baker, in contrast, notes success in achieving "mastery" through "deformation," a process that began with adoption of the a mask of mintrelsy in order to reassert African interests"
 
I. Cultural Explosion of the 1920s
 
A. Black and white writers: similarites and differences (report Douglas, Terrible Honesty, chs. 1-2)
 
B. Harlem in the literary imagination: Report on De Jongh, James, Vicious modernism : Black Harlem and the literary imagination (Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1990) [ McCabe PS153.N5 D4 1990]
 
II. Key documents/figures of the Harlem Renaissance Reassessed
 
A. Alain Locke et al, The New Negro
 
B. Jean Toomer
 
C. Langston Hughes and the "Blues"
 
III. Ann Douglas Terrible Honesty

(aspects not considered above).
 
The following outlines of some major themes/issues by chapter.
 
i. Role of "offstage influences" William James, Gertrude Stein and Freud (chs 3-4)
 
ii. Social/political context of the literary renaissance , including impact of WWI (ch 5)
 
iii. Matricide and the attack on Victorian culture (as extension of argument of Douglas, Feminization of American Culture );and role of "black men" and "white ladyship" in literary and social thought )chs 6-7).
 
iv. Black and white in the making of modern "American" culture
 
How and why Harlem was central (ch 8)
Rags, slang, Blues , and Jazz (chs 8-9)
The skyscraper and the mood of Manhattan
 
v. End and legacy? (Epilogue)