Engaging Tradition, Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African American Literature

Engaging Tradition, Making It New offers a rich collection of fresh scholarly and pedagogical approaches to new African American literature. Organized around the theme of transgression, the collection focuses on those writers who challenge the reading habits and expectations of students and instructors, whether by engaging themes and literary forms not usually associated with African American literature or by departing from traditional modes of approaching historical, social, or legal struggles. Each chapter offers a specific reading of a particular novel, memoir, or poetry collection, sometimes in concert with a second, related text, and suggests both a useful critical context and one or more pedagogical approaches. Engaging Tradition, Making It New points the way toward exciting new methods of teaching and researching authors in this dynamic field.

Stephanie Brown is an assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University. Her publications on African American literature, film, and theory have appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Mosaic, and Paradoxa, among other journals, as well as in various essay collections. She teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, and film. Éva Tettenborn is an assistant professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles on contemporary African American literature in Callaloo, Critique, MELUS, The Southern Literary Journal, and other journals. At Penn State Worthington Scranton she teaches African American literature, American studies, and writing courses.