Programs

FREEDOM AND REBELLION: FROM WALT WHITMAN TO LANGSTON HUGHES

The artistic, philosophical, and cultural freedom prized by Negro Renaissance writers Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston recalls the mid-nineteenth century iconoclasm of Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Whitman. This lecture by Burney Hollis introduces and compares the rebellious writers of these two periods, who set new standards and explored new modes of expression, redefined themselves as Americans, and attempted to declare independence from the confines of tradition. Adult and high school audiences.

Burney J. Hollis is Professor of English and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Morgan State University. He earned his Ph.D. in English with concentrations in Colonial and Nineteenth Century American Literature and African-American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, his A.M. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and his A.B. in English from Morgan State University.