English 9181B
Representing Slavery in US Literature
Instructor: Professor Alyssa MacLean.
Winter Half Course.
After his own escape from slavery, the anti-slavery activist and author William Wells Brown stated, “slavery has never been represented, slavery never can be represented.” This course will explore the different attempts made by U.S. authors to represent the “peculiar institution” of American slavery--even when they realized that the very endeavor of representing the physical and epistemological violence of U.S. slavery was bound to fail. We will begin the term by examining the strategies and effects of nineteenth-century writing in a variety of genres and modes, including autobiography (Harriet Jacobs), sentimental fiction (Harriet Beecher Stowe), and political polemic (Nat Turner’s Confessions). From there, we will explore the legacy of slavery through Faulkner’s nostalgic fantasies in Absalom, Absalom!, Morrison’s “re-memories” of African American history in Beloved, and Colson Whitehead’s phantasmagoric reconfiguration of slavery in The Underground Railroad. We will also conduct a field trip to the rare books room to create our own rare books display on the representation of slavery.
