ENGL 4510

James Baldwin and Philosophy

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

As a writer, James Baldwin was active in many genres. Novelist, essayist, cultural commentator, and, of course, critic, are some of them. This course is interested in the ways in which James Baldwin might be said to have taken up philosophical issues in his writing. More simply phrased, what kind of thinking does Baldwin's writing evince? Baldwin, it seems, is never only taking up issues of race, or religion, or the diasporic condition, or critiquing America's failure to live to its own political promise(s). There is always a philosophical question at stake: Baldwin must be thought, at some level, through abstraction to get fully, properly, at the questions Baldwin is trying to address. To this end, this course will read Baldwin's works in relation to some of the criticism – the theoretical responses – that his work has provoked. Baldwin will be read as a religious thinker (the thinker of religion), Baldwin as a thinker of the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin as a film scholar.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)

Comments Co-meets with ASRC 6110.

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