3-5 Secondary Sources:
- Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Taylor and Francis, 2002.
- Ezell, Margaret. Writing Women’s Literary History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
- Gates, Henry Louis. “’What’s Love Got to Do with It?’: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.” New Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 345-62. JSTOR, doi: 2307/468733.
- Hyot, Eric. “On Periodization.” On Literary Worlds.” Oxford UP, 2012.
Journal:
Callaloo
Keywords:
- Canon Formation
- Category Definition v. Reality of Works
- Harlem Renaissance
Explanatory Essay:
For this assignment, I met with Professors Harris and Seiler because they have a lot of experience in the era I am fascinated by at this moment and would like to explore. I am interested in canon formation in general and the authors who do not fit the defined characteristics and subjects that have been accepted as that era’s hallmarks. While this can be applied to any time in literary history, the Harlem Renaissance is uniquely interesting for a few reasons. I am interested not only in canon as formulated by elites of the general literary establishment, but also the elites within nontraditional literary movements. Women played a huge role in the Harlem Renaissance movement through working with periodicals, writing, and bringing other artists together to those gatherings a current audience knows were sources of amazing inspiration and the germ for works we study today. The Harlem Renaissance was recent enough to provide a decent record of these women’s contributions, and I want to know how they were simultaneously accepted in the social scene and excluded from the list of names associated with this time’s work. What were their interactions with their male peers, who sometimes served as colleagues at publications? How did so many women get defined by one scandal, such as Larsen’s possible later-career plagiarism, as justification for not acknowledging their work’s quality? What do authors like Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jessie Redmane Fauset’s works say about other issues and themes than we see in black male narratives that traditionally make up the definition for that movement. I am starting here with some theory about canon formation from newer, black critics and more recursive ones. From there, I anticipate reading some of the movement’s own authors’ writing about the politics of the time along with their fictional work and its breadth of subject matter and emotional exploration. I want to explore the way other authors might change our understanding of the period and who was active within it. The formulation of the canon affects the writing of generations who study it, so what effect might a reformulation have on future writers reading and studying this period today?
This seems like a really interesting topic to gain more insight about, especially since it’s been such a prominent point of discussion in our class. The Harlem Renaissance seems like a great place to look as, like you said, women started to contribute in the writing sphere at a great rate than previously. I would also wonder how women started contributing to writing during other points in history, such as wartime. As men went away to fight in wars, were women more able to write more freely and fill the void that men might have left when the left their jobs for a brief point in history? This might be another interesting event to revisit to see if the literary canon underwent any other changes during this time as well.
I think that this is a great start and that you will definitely benefit from utilizing our previous class discussions and secondary literature in delving further into this topic. It seems like you are fairly interested in the role that women play in being authors “who do not fit the defined characteristics and subjects that have been accepted as that era’s hallmarks,” but I wonder if you might want to go beyond this and explore the ways in which other authors within other typically marginalized groups contributed to the literary world outside the cannon. In addition, I would definitely suggest speaking with professors in the history department at Dickinson, as I think that your thesis will require a significant amount of historical information in order to outline the Harlem Renaissance era, its societal conventions, and what was deemed to be classic literary staples of that time period (and perhaps the ways in which society has continued to accept some of these ‘classics’ even today). Great topic!