ENGL 525PH: HOPE IN PROTEST LIT

California State University, Northridge

This course will study a significant body of U.S. literature that depicts the struggles and hopes of socially marginalized and oppressed people in the U.S. Students will explore its depictions of class, race, and gender-based suffering, but, equally, the ways in which it is forward-looking, locating hope in crisis and even imagining a society without the injuries suffered from social injustices. Several of these texts depict characters who are "strong with the not yet in the now," as Tillie Olsen writes in one of her stories. Students will address the literary strategies writers employed to depict hope amidst suffering, including their borrowings from contemporaneous literary genres and movements, such as utopian literature, realism, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Depression-era Proletarian Literary Movement. Authors include Edward Bellamy, Upton Sinclair, W.E.B. Du Bois, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Tillie Olsen, Mary Heaton Vorse, James Agee, and Richard Wright.