FALL 2003
HON/HUM/ENG 394

“Race,” Writing, and Difference: The Irish and Harlem Renaissances

MW 1:40-2:55                           

Office Hours: MW 3:15 – 4:15
                       F   10:3 - 11:30
                       TTH by appt.

Last updated
3 December 2003
Dr. Jacquie Lynch

Office: Irish Hall A-208
E-mail: jacquie.lynch@asu.edu
Phone: 480 / 965-6780

Course Description

          

SCHEDULE OF CLASSES

This Daily Schedule Is Subject to Change; Any Changes Will Be Announced in Class.

Web = Readings and images posted for print out on the Class Web Page
Reader I & II = Printed course reader (purchase at The Alternative Copy Shop)

M, Aug. 25    Introduction to course

The Idea of Race

W, Aug. 27   Idea of Race 1-44; Seminar Participation Guidelines.  Film: Ethnic Notions
F, Aug. 29    Web Board Registration Deadline: Introductory Post due by 4:00 p.m. 
                     Your post should introduce yourself and state that you accept the seminar participation guidelines.

M, Sept. 1    Labor Day
W, Sept. 3    Graves (Reader I, 3-7); Idea of Race 45-78: Gobineau, Darwin

M, Sept. 8     Smedley & Gates (Reader I, 8-30)

W, Sept. 10   Curtis, Apes & Angels (Reader I, 31-48 & handout)


Introduction to the Irish Renaissance

The “Irishry” have preserved their ancient “deposit” through wars which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became wars of extermination.  No people, Lecky said at the opening of his Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, have undergone greater persecution, nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our own day.  No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive, there are moments when hatred poisons my life. . . .Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser, and to Blake, perhaps also to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.   
                                            –W.B. Yeats, “A General Introduction for my Work”


M, Sept. 15    Irish Literature & History to the Renaissance
                      Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland” and Moran, “Battle of Two Civilizations” (handouts)
W, Sept. 17    Irish Renaissance Overview
Shaw, from John Bull’s Other Island ( web or pdf ); Pearse, from Three Lectures on Gaelic Topics (handout); Ledwidge, “Ireland” ; Plunkett, “This Heritage to this Race of Kings” & "The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last" (web)
M, Sept. 22    Overview, cont.
Gregory, Chapter I from Our Irish Theatre (web) & The Rising of the Moon; Eglington, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?”; Yeats, “An Irish National Theatre” [handouts]

Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance

W, Sept. 24     African-American Literature & History to the Renaissance: Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”;
                        Chestnutt, “The Doll” [handouts].  Lucy Terry's "Bars Fight" poem and background.

M, Sept. 29     Harlem Renaissance Overview: Johnson, from The Book of American Negro Poetry &
                        Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” [VHR 281-309]; Schomburg, “The Negro
                        Digs Up His Past” (VHR 216-221); Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” (VHR 312-313) &
                        “The New Negro (VHR 47-56).  VHR= Voices of the Harlem Renaissance

W, Oct. 1        Idea of Race: Boas (84-88); Du Bois (108-117).  Domingo, “Africa for the Africans (VHR 25-27); Garvey & Du Bois [VHR 35-42]
One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.  The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife. . . . In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost . . . to be both a Negro and an American . . . to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture.      
                                            –W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Ancestral Heroes

M, Oct. 6        The Celtic Twilight: Gregory, “The Only Son of Aoife” and “The Death of Cuchulain” [web];
                        Yeats, “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea”; Yeats, On Baile’s Strand  [handouts]
   
W, Oct. 8        “The Negro Digs Up His Past”: Hurston, “Uncle Monday” (VHR 244-51); Hughes, “Negro” &
                        “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (VHR 153-55); Cullen, “Heritage” (VHR 142-45)
"I had walked two seasons through, and moved among
Strange ways and folk, and all the while no line was wrung
In praise or balm of aught from my frost-bitten tongue. . .
then I walked in a room where Irish poets were.”      
                                            --Countee Cullen, “After a Visit”

Peasants & Folk I: Working Class Poverty and Dignity

M, Oct. 13    Synge, Riders to the Sea; Yeats, “The Fisherman”
            
W, Oct. 15    Hurston, “Sweat” (VHR 199-207); Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America” (VHR 154-5); DuBois, “On Being Black” (VHR 211-15)


Revolution and Rage
   
M, Oct. 20    Easter 1916: Pearse, “I am Ireland,” “Ideal, or Renunciation,” “The Rebel”; “Proclamation of the Irish Republic”;
                        Yeats, “Easter 1916”; Stephens, selections from The Insurrection in Dublin.  Pearse & Yeats Focus Questions. 
                         Presentation: Jenny Allen on Easter 1916 Rebellion

W, Oct. 22    McKay, “If We Must Die,” “The Lynching,” “The White House,” “America” (VHR 353-55]; G.D. Johnson,
                        “Old Black Men” (VHR 356); Hughes, “Ku Klux” and “American Heartbreak” (in-class listening);
                        Meerpold & Holiday, Strange Fruit.  Annotated Bibliography due.


Questioning Ethnic and National Identity            

M, Oct. 27    Joyce, “The Dead” & Moore, “Homesickness”
Some questions to consider as you read "The Dead":

1.       How would you describe Gabriel Conroy?  Find several places in the text where his character is revealed through exposition (description) and action/dialogue.  Does his character change after his "epiphany" (sudden revelation)?

2.       Pay close attention to the character of Freddy Malins.  How is he represented?  Beyond comic relief, what is his function in the story? 

3.       Who narrates this story?  Is s/he reliable? 

4.       Pay attention to the references to political figures important to Irish history.  What are Gabriel's attitudes toward them?

5.       Much critical attention has been focused on the story's ambiguous ending.  Based upon evidence in the text, do you think Gabriel achieves "heroic" transcendence and a new level of self-knowledge as he transcends his material circumstances, or does his swoon indicate a bow to the inevitable paralysis resulting from his own inadequacy and the sterile world into which he has been acculturated?


W, Oct. 29    Joyce, from Ulysses, “Telemachus” and “Scylla & Charybdis”  
                      Presentations: Kyle Wilkinson on Joyce & Parnell; Diane Elshiekh on Joyce and the Irish Renaissance.

M, Nov. 3    Hughes, “Passing”; Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
                      Presentation: Rachel Farber on Passing and Passing Novels

W, Nov. 5    Johnson's Autobiography cont.  Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” & “What White Publishers
                     Won’t Print” (handouts); Johnson, "Fifty Years" (VHR 222-24).  
                      Presentations: Sofia Olsson on the Irish Flag and National Symbol; Penny Scott on Contemporary Concepts of "Race"

Peasants & Folk II:    Realism or Ethnographic Imagination?

M, Nov. 10    Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Chapters 1-9
                      Presentation: Roxanne Barwick on JM Synge and ZN Hurston's Ethnography

W, Nov. 12    Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Chapters 10-17
                      Presentations:  Sarah Joranstaad on  Poetry of the Irish Renaissance; Peter Karpuk on  "Race" and US Legislation

M, Nov. 17    Hurston, Their Eyes . . . Chapters 18-19;  Locke, “Sterling Brown” (VHR 251-7)
                      Presentations: Brooke Deubler on Racism in 21st-century Ireland; Evan Storey on Mexican and Mexican-American Identity

W, Nov. 19    Syllabus change!  Author Charles Johnson will visit our class.  Read the Johnson short stories distributed on
                      Wednesday, Nov. 12 and prepare questions for the author.


Irish-American & African-American Relations

M, Nov. 24    Moved from Nov. 19!:  Synge, Playboy of the Western World ; Responses to Synge’s Playboy (Reader II)
                      Presentation: Tianna Tagami on Japanese-American Identity

Tianna Tagami
W, Nov. 26    Optional Student Conferences: No class meeting.  Paper Drafts due.

M, Dec. 1    “How the Irish Became White” & “Brendan Behan’s New York”
                      Presentations: Erin McCarthy on Yeats and Cullen's Poetics; Raquel Fagan on Humanism vs. Ethnic Pride

W, Dec. 3    Reflections on the Irish Renaissance: Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”; Gogarty, from As I Was Going
                    Down Sackville Street; Moore, from Hail and Farewell (handouts). 
                    Presentation: Adam Hess and Tim Agne on Ireland's 1798 Uprising

M, Dec. 8    Reflections on the Harlem Renaissance: Thurman, from Infants of the Spring (VHR 316-23); Hughes,
                    from The Big Sea (VHR 370-81) & “Harlem” (posted on web board).  Papers Due.
    
“Race,” Writing, and Difference is an interdisciplinary, discussion-based seminar that explores ethnic, national, and so-called racial identity by studying social and biological theories of “race” alongside works from the Irish Renaissance, roughly 1878-1925, and the Harlem Renaissance, roughly 1910-1940. These two cultural renaissances aimed to shatter derogatory ethnic stereotypes by representing the complex realities of Irish and African American experience and cultural production.  Exploring the cross-cultural inspiration and correspondence between these two rich but long-oppressed cultures highlights the arbitrary nature of racial categorization and provides insight into the ways that artists, poets, and intellectual leaders of both cultures focused on shared themes as they struggled for social equality and cultural survival.  

We will consider common themes such as renaissance reinventions of “Ancestral Heroes” and  “Peasants and Folk,” in addition to “Rage and Revolution” and “Questioning Ethnic and National Identity,” which explores the artistic and political tensions that inevitably result when individuals within a culture attempt to answer questions of group identity, such as “What is the appropriate source of a particular ethnic or national aesthetic?” and “Can a class or sub-population (e.g., the rural peasant, the urban artist, etc.) adequately represent the diversity inherent in any human population?”  Our final segment on 20th-century African-American and Irish-American Relations within the United States builds upon these themes even as it leads to new questions regarding cultural diversity.  We will supplement our focus on literature with studies of history, politics, biology, anthropology, music, and art to consider contemporary ethnic identity from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Aims:

1.    To improve skills in analytical reading, research, critical discussion and evaluation, and the construction of oral and written arguments
2.    To broaden the student’s understanding of social and biological theories of “race”
3.    To expose the student to intellectual and artistic dialogues regarding theories of cultural production and ethnic identity
4.    To promote awareness and appreciation of cultural diversity within the contemporary United States.