FIELD X: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
STATEMENT OF EXPECTATIONS
A S P UBLISHED ON M AY 19,2014
The field exam is designed to measure candidates’ potential to produce advanced scholarship and to teach college-level cours on African American literature. Therefore, answers on the written exam should display extensive and specialized knowledge of the field of African American literature, including the canon of primary texts, significant condary scholarship, and major historical developments.
Specifically, answers should demonstrate experti in:
•Foundational African American literary genres and their conventions, histories, and cultural significance (e.g. poetry, drama, fiction, autobiography, slave
narratives, oral tradition, etc.).
•The historical and literary subfields that compri the larger field of African American studies as well as the significance of tho subfields (e.g. antebellum
literature, Reconstruction, the “Nadir,” Naturalism, the Harlem Renaissance,
Modernism, the Civil Rights era, the Black Arts Movement, women’s writing,
Postmodernism, etc.).
•Established and current literary criticism and scholarship on African American literature, including recent shifts that re-conceptualize aspects of the field (such as transnational and hemispheric studies).
Answers on the written exam should also:
•Advance and develop substantial interpretive arguments that are firmly rooted in sophisticated analysis of primary texts and engage dynamically with
condary critical sources.
•Demonstrate an authoritative, convincing, and original individual perspective on the material.
The examiners will ask questions that can—and should—be addresd with texts on the reading list.
If relevant to a question, however, any texts in the field, whether studied independently or through cour work, may be ud by the candidate.
FIELD X: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
READING LIST
A S P UBLISHED ON M AY 19,2014
I. Primary Texts
A. African American Literature Before 1910
(Colonial, Antebellum, and Postbellum Literature)
Phyllis Wheatley. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773)
Jupiter Hammon. “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly” (1778)
Olaudah Equiano. Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa (1789) Nat Turner. “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (1831)
Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) Sojourner Truth. “Speech at Akron Convention” (1851)敬老院活动策划书
William Wells Brown. Clotel, or, The President's Daughter (1853)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harpe r. “The Slave Mother” (1854)
Martin R. Delany. Blake, or, The Huts of America (1857)
Frank J. Webb. The Garies and Their Friends (1857)
Harriet E. Wilson. Our Nig (1859)
Harriet Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Iola Leroy (1892)
Charles Chesnutt. The Conjure Woman and Other Tales (1899)
Charles Chesnutt. The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery (1901)
Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Sport of the Gods (1902)
W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Paul Laurence Dunbar. Selections from Complete Poems (1913) as follows:
“We Wear the Mask”
“When Malindy Sings”
“The Haunted Oak”
“The Colored Soldiers”
“Sympathy”
“Little Brown Baby”
“Dinah Kneading Dough”实践调研报告
“An Ante-Bellu m Sermon”
“Frederick Douglass”
“When Dey ’Listed Colored Soldiers”
B. African American Literature 1910-1960
(The Harlem Renaissance and Modernism)
James Weldon Johnson. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) Claude McKay. Selections from Harlem Shadows (1922) as follows: “The Harlem Dancer”
“Harlem Shadows”手表排行
“If We Must Die”
沟通是什么“The Lynching”大同有什么好玩的地方
“Africa”
“America”
Jean Toomer. Cane (1923)
Countee Cullen. Color (1925)
Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro (1925)
Langston Hughes. Selections from Collected Poems (1995) as follows: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
“The Weary Blues”
“Dream Variation”
“I, Too”
“Let America Be America Again”
“Mulatto”
“Visitors to the Black Belt”
“Note on Commercial Theatre”
“Trumpet Player”
“Theme for English B”
“Dream Deferred” (also titled “Harlem” in “Lenox Avenue Mural”)
“Christ in Alabama”
James Weldon Johnson. Selections from Complete Poems (2000) as follows: “O Black and Unknown Bards”
“The White Witch”
God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Ver (1927)
Nella Larn. Quicksand (1928)
Zora Neale Hurston. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1929)
Nella Larn. Passing (1929)
Claude McKay. Banjo (1929)
Wallace Thurman. The Blacker the Berry (1929)
Sterling A. Brown. Selections from Collected Poems (1989) as follows: “Ma Rainey”
“Children of the Mississippi”
配音英文“Cabaret”
“Mister Samuel and Sam”
“Master and Man”
“Remembering Nat Turner”
“Bitter Fruit of the Tree”
George Schuyler. Black No More (1931)
Zora Neale Hurston. Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
Arna Bontemps. Black Thunder (1936)
Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Melvin Tolson. “Dark Symphony” (1939)
Richard Wright. Native Son (1940)
Richard Wright. Black Boy (1945)
Ann Petry. The Street (1946)
Dorothy West. The Living Is Easy (1948)
Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Gwendolyn Brooks. Selections from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed (2003) as follows:
“The Mother”
“The Children of the Poor”
“We Real Cool”
“The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”
Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)
C. African American Literature 1960-Prent
(Black Arts Movement to Postmodernism and Beyond)
Amiri Baraka. “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” (1961)
Robert Hayden. “Middle Passage” (1962)
Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963)
Amiri Baraka. Dutchman (1964)
Malcolm X with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) Samuel Delany. Babel-17 (1966)
Nikki Giovanni. “Nikki-Rosa” (1968)
Ann Moody. Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)
Toni Cade Bambara. “The Lesson” (1972)
Alice Walker. “Everyday U” (1973)
Albert Murray. Train Whistle Guitar (1974)
Ntozake Shange. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf (1976)
Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon (1977)
Audre Lorde. “Power” (1978)
Octavia E. Butler. Kindred (1979)
Alice Walker. The Color Purple (1982)
Paule Marshall. Praisong for the Widow (1983)
Michelle Cliff. Abeng (1984)
Jamaica Kincaid. Annie John (1985)
Toni Morrison. Beloved (1987)
August Wilson. The Piano Lesson (1987)
Gloria Naylor. Mama Day (1988)
Randall Kenan. “The Foundations of the Earth” (1992)
Ernest J. Gaines. A Lesson Before Dying (1993)
Edwidge Danticat. The Farming of Bones (1998)
ZZ Packer. “Drinking Coffee Elwhere” (2000)
Percival Everett. Erasure (2001)
Jesmyn Ward. Salvage the Bones (2011)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Americanah (2013)
II. Secondary Scholarship
African Americans in Art: Selections from the Art Institute of Chicago (1998)
William L. Andrews. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1986)卡仙奴
Houston A. Baker, Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987)
Bernard W. Bell. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987)
John Blassingame. The Slave Community (1972)
Hazel Carby. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987)
Barbara Christian. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980)
Angela Davis. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998)
写出一副春联
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988)
Maryemma Graham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004) Adam Gussow. Seems Like Murder Here:Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2002) Joph E. Holloway. Africanisms in American Culture. 2nd ed. (2005)
bell hooks. “Postmodern Blackness” (1990)
