Pavlic, Edward
T 2 :20 PM
MLC 367
No Time To Rest: James Baldwin in Fiction and in Real Time
"in life, to be loved is to be in perpetual danger, it means having no time to rest. . ." (James Baldwin, 1959)
This course explores the life and work of the writer James Baldwin (1924-1987). Black and queer, Baldwin was a writer whose work bridged genres and spanned the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. Starting in the late-1950s, he began to engage politics in the emerging Black freedom movement in the South, as well as in generally left-leaning political causes in New York and abroad. While historically more widely praised as an essayist than as a novelist, we'll focus on Baldwin's six novels: Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953); Giovanni's Room (1956); Another Country (1962); Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968); If Beale Street Could Talk (1974); and Just Above My Head (1979). We'll supplement the novels with biographies, selected essays, interviews, and with references to Baldwin's personal correspondence. In addition, I think it would be interesting to consider Baldwin's voice and image in real time: recorded interviews, speeches, his appearances in film and on TV over the decades as well as in film versions of his work. The goal is to immerse ourselves in Baldwin's voice, primarily in fiction, charting the development of his concerns from novel to novel and the ways they engage their historical moments as well as ours. The foundation of the course, possibly, is Baldwin's developing negotiation between a sense of life grounded in the isolated individualism of the American tradition, and a Black-identified conception of life as a matter of mutual consequence.