Kanye West has already been on one side of the academic seesaw recently, having taught his way out of community service over the summer. Today, we're happy to report that Georgia State professor Dr. Scott Heath has taken it upon himself to come up with the ultimate curriculum stuffer in a class entitled Kanye Versus Everybody: Black Poetry and Poetics from Hughes to Hip-Hop. It appears someone has managed to salvage what little we've been offered in the form of non-rant Yeezy and give him the self-adoring treatment he's been so fiending for. The syllabus claims that class will seek to:
“investigate the continuous development of African American poetry and poetics—the uses of language and literature to represent blackness and Americanness in particular—observing shifting meanings in and of the text with important considerations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”
All of which seems pretty reasonable, actually. If we were to examine how sentimental and poignant his early words were compared to the self-amplified, almost cartoonish displays we get to take on today (outside of the ever tender "Only One"), a case certainly be made for how that shift is indicative of the game as a whole and hopefully spark a generation's interest in the great black architects of prose and rhetoric that came well before him.
spotted at The FADER
