Required of students in Writing and Literature. Ways of Reading focuses on a particular canonical author or text(s), utilizing various critical perspectives and secondary sources to support a deeper understanding of the work. The course further develops and reinforces practical skills in close reading, historical contextualization, applied critical theory, and the use of discipline-specific research tools and resources, encouraging conscious reflection on critical presuppositions and practices. This course prepares students to enter the Critical Essay Workshop.Section DescriptionFocus will fall on representative works by the great Black American woman writer of the first half of the twentieth century, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). Required readings will include her work with the novel (Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God), autobiography (from Dust Tracks On a Road), folklore and ethnography (from Mules and Men and Sanctified Church), short stories (her Complete Stories), and Hurston’s musical recordings, as ethnomusicologist —and singer. Also possible are selections from Hurston’s essays and journalism, her published letters, and her work for the theatre. We’ll supplement our reading of Hurston’s works by considering various biographical and critical interpretations, both contemporary with her life and more recent. To help illuminate the historical context of Hurston’s time, we’ll open by reading from W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic attempt to “show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century,” The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Students will be expected to write regular response papers, several brief essays, and a longer final project.

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