Toni Morrison questions

ask questions.
think of answers.
see you tomorrow.

Final paper topics

You are welcome to devise your own topic, as long as you run it by me first.

Examine representations of memory and history in one or two of Charles Chesnutt’s tales. To what extent are the African-American characters the “keepers of memory” or “embodiment of history” in these stories? Are Uncle Julius’s tales personal memories or communal ones? What connections can we make between racial identity and national memory?

Choose two or three of Langston Hughes’s poems and craft an argument about the different types of voices that Hughes embodies (colloquial, formal, particular, universal, gendered, racialized, maybe even the voice of musical instruments). Which voices does he use in your chosen poems, and why? How does the reader/listener get drawn in to these poems; what forms are we asked to take?

Analyze the links between performance and gender in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Prufrock tries on various masks and personae; he imagines himself playing a bit part in a Shakespeare play. How does this sense of self as performance relate to Prufrock’s sense of his gender and sexuality? How does he construct his own masculinity, and how does he imagine his relationship to women or femininity in the poem?

Much of what we know about Hemingway’s characters, and their relationships, come from dialogue rather than from the narrator’s commentary. Using close readings, analyze Hemingway’s use of dialogue. How do these interactions between characters help build up an account of their relationship? Be sure to examine what is said as well as what is excluded from conversation.

Mountain peak, hills like white elephants, clean, well-lighted place: examine representations of place in Hemingway. How are characters’ identities and their development impacted by their physical location (real or imagined)? How does Hemingway use space/place metaphorically? Consider smaller examples of place (the café, the train station, the tent) as well as the iconic places of the titles. You may write on one story or choose to compare.

Analyze the shifts in the narrator’s voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God. At times the narrator seems to speak in a formal and abstract voice; at others she speaks from the perspective of Janie; still other times she speaks in a communal voice. Sometimes Hurston uses direct dialogue; at other times she uses free indirect discourse (see me if you haven’t encountered this term before). How does the narrator’s voice develop over time? Is the narrator’s voice different in each section (Janie’s childhood and her marriage to Logan Killicks, her marriage to Jody, her relationship with Tea Cake, the ending)? If you choose this topic, you may want to use the essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at the end of the novel, as a source. I recommend you come up with your own argument before you read his essay, though.

Analyze images of eyes and vision in Hurston. This novel is highly interested in images of watching: the opening lines describe a man watching ships at a distance; the next scenes shows the entire town watching Janie walk down the street. What kind of power is vision; what kind of encounter between persons is “watching”? How do mundane acts of watching relate to the searing, searching eyes of the title? Why does Hurston title her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Compare the writings of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsburg, or Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Walt Whitman. All three of these writers explicitly reference Whitman as a major influence—why? What common ideals, imagery, styles, sensibilities, do you find? Where do they diverge? How do these writers compare to Whitman’s sense of national identity? Of personal identity? You may want to look at Whitman’s “The Song of the Open Road” if you choose Ginsburg or Kerouac.

Analyze the role of childhood and memory in The Woman Warrior. Kingston tells the story from an adult’s perspective, but we always have a sense of herself as a child experiencing these stories simultaneously, whether as a character in “Barbarian Reed Pipe” or as the recipient of her mother’s stories in “No Name Woman.” How does the presence of Kingston-as-child, and her relationship to her mother, impact our reading of the tale? Does it change our position as readers to have to imagine her both as authoritative writer and as still-forming child? How are the stories different when they are told to the child or by the child, as opposed to how they are framed by the adult Kingston?

New Morrison Topics:
Analyze the imagery of Eden and "the fall" in A Mercy. Where and how does Morrison use Edenic or Adam and Eve imagery? What kind(s) of "falls" (literal/figurative/vocabulary of falling) do we witness, and what is the cause of the fall? How does she use snake imagery? Is there a Satan? How does her story diverge from the Eden story?

Discuss water imagery in A Mercy. Many events in the novel happen on the shore of a river or bay, on a ship, or involve water in some way. What does water represent for Morrison? Is it related to healing or destruction--to freedom or enslavement--to travel or stasis--to salvation or damnation--or does it invite a more complicated/mixed interpretation?

Analyze stories of birth and origins in A Mercy. We see only a few examples of successful births that lead to healthy children; why? How do we read the birth of Sorrow's child as it relates to all the orphans and foundlings in the tale? If this is also a novel about the "birth" or origins of American culture, how might we relate all of the characters' confused/obscured origins to the origins of the nation?

Maxine Hong Kingston discussion questions

Questions are in the comments! You know the drill.

Questions on Zora Neale Hurston

Please read the discussion questions in the "comments" section and choose at least one to prepare to answer in class!

Discussion Questions on Stein / Pound / Eliot

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein


Ezra Pound's mugshot (he was arrested for making
anti-American broadcasts and tried for treason during WWII).


Wyndham Lewis's portrait of T.S. Eliot

Harlem Renaissance Art

Archibald Motley, "Blues" (1929)


Ellis Wilson, Summer Magic


Aaron Douglas, Song of the Towers (1934)


Aaron Douglas, "Into Bondage" (1936)


Palmer Hayden, "Midsummer Night in Harlem" (1938)

Whitman and James on the American literary tradition

These are the passages from Whitman and James that I read aloud in class. They give contrasting views on the promises and difficulties of establishing an American literary tradition.

Walt Whitman, open letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856
Full text available here: http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume1/belasco/lettertoralph.htm
(note error in publication date on this website)

The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language -- all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own, to be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female -- to give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America, with all the passions of home, with the inimitable sympathies of having been boys and girls together, and of parents who were with our parents.

What else can happen The States, even in their own despite? That huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable, has done incalculable good here, and is to be spoken of for its own sake with generous praise and with gratitude. Yet the price The States have had to lie under for the same has not been a small price. Payment prevails; a nation can never take the issues of the needs of other nations for nothing. America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations? They struggled long for their literature, painfully working their way, some with deficient languages, some with priest-craft, some in the endeavor just to live -- yet achieved for their times, works, poems, perhaps the only solid consolation left to them through ages afterward of shame and decay. You are young, have the perfectest of dialects, a free press, a free government, the world forwarding its best to be with you. As justice has been strictly done to you, from this hour do strict justice to yourself. Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood.

Henry James, from "Hawthorne," chapter 2
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/nhhj2.html

An American reads between the lines--he completes the suggestions--he constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice in saying that the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blankness--a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail. Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for detail, and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements that were absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle--it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life--especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains--that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. It would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him the consolation of his national gift, that "American humour" of which of late years we have heard so much.