English 176tm. Toni Morrison

Instructor: Namwali Serpell
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Course Site

This course is a survey of the work of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, including most of her novels, a few nonfiction essays, and a short story. We will consider her literary antecedents; follow her influence on contemporaries and future writers; trace the social, historical, and political contexts and implications of her work; and explore the critical interventions she made in historiography and literary criticism. Throughout, we will focus on Morrison’s rich and complex aesthetic project: how it came into being; how it resonates with a great range of philosophical questions from epistemology to ethics; and how it changed over time.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.