Since the mid-1970s an outpouring of sophisticated, compelling literature by Afro-American women writers has made a great impact on literary criticism and established itself as an important area of scholarship. This semester-long course will focus on novels by Afro-American female writers Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. The critical issues we will deal with include: How do the African-American women writers critique and revise the male literary tradition and the white female literary tradition? How do these novels represent the experiences of “otherness”? How do race and gender intersect in these novels’ representation of black experience? How do these authors re-vision and re-name the black female body to contest its representations in the white mainstream literature and the Afro-American male literature. We will also study their aesthetic experimentation and inventiveness in order to explore the relationship between politics and poetics. Afro-American literary theory and feminist theory will be discussed in the first five weeks to provide a critical perspective in reading these novels.