| 1. Melvin B. Tolson was considered a Modernist poet. Discuss traditional conventions of literary modernism, and support or refute the view of Tolson’s poetry as Modernist poetry. |
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| 2. Discuss the impact of black vernacular traditions and music on Tolson’s writing. |
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| 3. How does Dorothy West represent black mother-daughter relationships in The Living Is Easy? |
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| 4. What black vernacular music traditions seem to have influenced Chester B. Himes’s “To What Red Hell?” On what do you base your answer? |
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| 5. Discuss the extent to which prison is used as a metaphor for slavery in Himes’s work. What is gained by this analogy? |
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| 6. What is the role of profanity and slang in Himes’s fiction? |
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| 7. Study Robert Hayden’s diction. Pay close attention to words that have multiple meanings and words you are unfamiliar with. Speculate about Hayden’s word choices and their poetic impact. |
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| 8. Hayden’s writing style has been described as “intellectual” and “formal.” On what tropes or rhetorical features in his poems do you think these judgments are based? What effect do these devices have on your appreciation of his poetry? |
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| 9. After reading the “Prologue” to Invisible Man, listen to “Black and Blue” on the Audio Companion CD. Discuss the narrator’s choice of that recording with his dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe grin and his oblique characterization of it as “poetry [made] out of being invisible.” |
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| 10. How does Ralph Ellison employ African American vernacular traditions in his work? |
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| 11. Identify some of the rhetorical devices by which Gwendolyn Brooks highlights mundane events in her poetry. Isolate passages from her poems that illustrate this skill. |
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| 12. Baldwin’s writing is often characterized as “evangelical” and “sermonic.” What elements of his writing create a tone that could be described as evangelical? |
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| 13. What does Wright seem to mean by the “ethics of living Jim Crow”? Think about your current classroom, and ask yourself to what extent such ethics are now outmoded. What dynamics at your university indicate that they remain in place? |
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| 14. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing” Wright claims that twentieth-century African American literature targets only white readers and not the “Negro masses.” Do you agree? Why, or why not? |
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| 15. To understand the narrative structure of “For My People,” identify the devices that Margaret Walker uses to create the prose-poetry structure of these lyrics. |
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| 16. Identify ways that Lorraine Hansberry contributes to the tradition of black writing about experiences during the Great Migration. Then identify ways that she expands that tradition. |
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| 17. Define dramatic realism and assess ways that Hansberry deploys it in A Raisin in the Sun. |
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| 18. Develop an effective strategy for the study of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and share it with the class. Then, with other students, compile your strategies into one master strategy for studying the drama. |
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