This document provides a course description for a graduate seminar on African-American slave narratives published before the Civil War. The seminar will explore the development of slave narratives as a genre and their relationship to genre theory. Students will analyze early fragmented narratives, the seminal works of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and later postmodern fiction. Requirements include weekly writing fragments, a compiled work with reflection, two in-class presentations, and an expanded conference paper. The goal is to introduce students to genre theory and the literary history of this foundational genre while challenging them to perform original readings of these important works.