The final examination for this course will be a student
portfolio including (though not limited to) a variety of original texts (whether this be a collection of short stories, research reports, poems, songs, videos, or a variety of each). Students will be creating these texts under the understanding that this course is about African
American Gothic texts from the horrors of slavery to the monstrosity of Jim Crow to the evils of the supposed post-racial America. Specifically, students will be
asked to write in and about the African American Gothic genre, creating
original narratives, poetry/lyrics/songs, short stories, and short
films/videos, etc. in order to do two things: 1) understand restrictions and limitations of African American Gothic conventions and 2) understand the reality of the Black experience. Ultimately, the course will allow students the opportunity to
write to learn by creating and remixing African American Gothic.
In this course, writing will be defined as mode for learning. By writing the Gothic, students will not only complete the two goals listed above, but they will also have the chance to invent, evaluate, reflect, conclude, analyze, and define through their writing. Students will be able to invent the Gothic; evaluate Gothic conventions; reflect on their own (and others') writing; analyze history, politics, literature, society, etc.; and define the African American experience.
The idea is that students will come into this course without any (or very limited) prior knowledge of African American Gothic as a genre. By writing to learn the genre, students will leave the course with the knowledge necessary to question other fields of study, disciplines, histories, race relations, and literatures (amongst other elements of society).
While this course is solidified in Composition Studies, Black Studies as a discipline values rhetorical strategies. However, as Molefi Kete Asante notes in Afrocentric Idea (1998), many rhetorical strategies have a Eurocentric grounding. It is therefore necessary to understanding how rhetoric has been instituted in African American Gothic texts (and perhaps most prominently in slave narratives, as the authors typically sought to use their narrative voices as a means to persuade for the abolition of slavery in the United States). As Lee Odell explains, using the theoretical backdrop of writing as a means to learn, students will "gain some control in the process of discovery in writing [and] relate the process of writing to a process of learning a given subject matter" (qtd. in Herrington 379). Thus, by writing African American Gothic texts, students will have the opportunity to explore not only the Anglo-derived Gothic techniques, but also Anglo-derived rhetorical techniques and their transmittal to the Americas in African American texts.
