HAR - The Harlem Renaissance Module Overview

The Harlem Renaissance Module Overview

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s during which African Americans expressed themselves through literature, music, and art. This movement centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City and involved a great deal of jazz music. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South into urban centers in the northern United States and the First World War, which created industrial work opportunities for hundreds of thousands of African Americans.

 

Essential Questions

  1. What are the common characteristics in writings of the Harlem Renaissance?
  2. How were the political and social movements reflected in the literature of this time period?
  3. Why is this literary period so significant?
  4. Who were the most prominent writers of poetry and prose in
    this movement, and what makes their writings continue to be powerful today?

 

Key Terms

  1. Figurative language - any language that is not meant to be taken literally
  2. Imagery: language and description that appeals to our five senses: sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch
  3. Personification: figure of speech in which a thing, an idea, or an animal is presented as if it is alive and has human characteristics
  4. Atmosphere: the feeling, emotion, or mood a writer conveys through the description of setting and objects within it
  5. Characterization: the way a writer helps the reader understand what kind of person a certain character is. Methods of characterization include direct description; the character's speech, actions, and thoughts; and other characters' thoughts and speech about the character
  6. Tone: the speaker's attitude toward the subject or the audience
  7. Symbol: an object used to represent a larger or more significant idea
  8. Enjambment: a poetic technique that carries the meaning from one line to the next without stopping for a comma or period
  9. Connotation: all of the meanings associated with a word
  10. Denotation: the literal meaning, or dictionary definition, of a word
  11. Simile: a type of metaphor that is directly stated, usually with the words "like" or "as"
  12. Metaphor: usually defined as a comparison between a familiar object and unfamiliar object that doesn't use "like" or "as," but it also means any use of a word or phrase that isn't meant to be taken literally
  13. Foreshadowing: hints about what will happen in the future suggested by a text
  14. Speaker: the voice sharing emotions and thoughts in a poem, not to be confused with the author
  15. Narrator: the person telling a story, not to be confused with the author
  16. Stanza: a group of lines in a poem that functions similar to the way a paragraph functions in prose writing
  17. Quatrain: a four-line stanza, or a grouping of four lines, in a poem
  18. Couplet: a two-line stanza, or a grouping of two lines, in a poem
  19. Meter: the rhythm or flow of a line of poetry based on stressed and unstressed syllables
  20. Rhyme: the use of the same sound at the ends of the words at the end of lines of poetry
  21. Sonnet: a fourteen-line poem that follows a strict rhyme scheme, uses iambic pentameter, and was popularized in the English-speaking world by Shakespeare
  22. Contrast: the use of ideas that are opposite or different in some way to make a point
  23. Allusion: a reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, sports, politics, science, or some other branch of culture; these are a sort of code that add a lot of meaning to a text without taking up a lot of space
  24. Diction: an author's choice of words; for example, hopeful diction, religious diction, formal diction
  25. Protest poetry: poetry that seeks to address real social and political issues and argues for change
  26. Double-consciousness: a term created by W.E.B. Dubois to describe how African Americans experience two selves - one American, one Black - through being constantly forced to see themselves as the dominant white culture sees them, not through their own self-consciousness
  27. Active voice: when the subject of the sentence does complete the action; these form stronger and more assertive sentences
  28. Passive voice: when the subject of the sentence does not complete the action; these sentences are weak and should usually be revised

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