Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité Syllabus

With the new year comes new courses, and that means new syllabi. This semester, I am teaching two courses, an English course and a Lillian E. Smith Studies course. I have taught these course numerous times, and you can find various iterations of the syllabi on my blog. Today, I want to share the syllabus for my English course, which I am entitling “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” for the purpose of this post.

This course arose from a few different places, but it specifically came out of the study travel trip to France that I am planning with a colleague. For that trip, I am teaching a course of African American expatriate writers in France. This would include individuals who spent extended time in France or who lived in France for the remainder of their lives. We can’t look at every expatriate author in this class, but we will read James Baldwin, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Claude McKay, and William Gardner Smith. (I will post the study travel syllabus when I get it worked up.)

The study travel course is unique because most students will take the lower level version of the course, which includes the authors mentioned above. If students have already taken that course or an equivalent, they will take a higher level course. For those students, they will have an extra book to read. They will read the book and present it to the class, discussing the connections…