This course will focus on the Nobel laureate’s influential novel, placing it in multiple contexts: history, Morrison’s body of fiction, literary and cultural criticism, and African American literary studies more generally. We will examine how the text responds to and reshapes historical events, and consider the intellectual interventions it makes in taking up this history. We will consider how concerns that Beloved raises—the task of “remembering” the past, and constructing cultural authority—are raised in other works by the author. Finally, we will ask how the award-winning novel, which is so often taught, written about, and included in literary curriculums, bears an impact on what is meant by “American literature.”