Sunday, April 29, 2012
Chapter 4 -- Due Thursday, I guess...
Well? A lot of talk--how is it working for you? Be specific...
Chapter 3
Are your feelings about any of the characters, or about the book overall, changing? How/why does Morrison manage that? Discuss.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Chapter 2
How is the novel developing? What do you notice about Morrison's methods? Mention specifics in your comment.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Beginning Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison, the most lauded American writer of our time, is also a profound scholar and critic of the American tradition, and her 1977 masterpiece, Song of Solomon, is a postmodern work that is in many ways a continuation and a critique of the literature we've been reading all year. Morrison gives us, as Miller does, a family; like Hawthorne and Fitzgerald and so on, she critiques American society and shows us a character who is in direct opposition to it; like Twain and Melville, she has her young protagonist go on a meaningful journey; like the transcendentalists (and Edwards and Cather and Whitman and Dickinson and Hemingway and Crevecoeur and so on), she is deeply interested in the American landscape and the relationship between people and nature.
Morrison is also African-American, and that fact shapes the novel in significant ways. For instance, I read the second half of the book as a reclaiming of the American pastoral tradition for African Americans. To this day, the relationship of African-Americans to "the woods" is often seen as conflicted and difficult; I have had Black students who talked about nature as something "white". So Song of Solomon in a sense reclaims nature for Black America--but it's a universal theme, and the book dramatizes the relationship of all of us urban-dwellers, both Black and other, to our ancestral pastoral past.
You should keep up with the reading schedule on the right, and for each night's reading, you should comment on a blog post. I will get posts up a couple of days before the comments are due. If you can't comment for technical reasons you may email me at eric_colburn (at) brookline (dot) k12 (dot) ma (dot) us or you may bring a written comment to class.
For Wednesday, read chapter 1 and write a comment about a very brief moment that you thought was interesting. Quote brief snippets to help you make your point.
Morrison is also African-American, and that fact shapes the novel in significant ways. For instance, I read the second half of the book as a reclaiming of the American pastoral tradition for African Americans. To this day, the relationship of African-Americans to "the woods" is often seen as conflicted and difficult; I have had Black students who talked about nature as something "white". So Song of Solomon in a sense reclaims nature for Black America--but it's a universal theme, and the book dramatizes the relationship of all of us urban-dwellers, both Black and other, to our ancestral pastoral past.
You should keep up with the reading schedule on the right, and for each night's reading, you should comment on a blog post. I will get posts up a couple of days before the comments are due. If you can't comment for technical reasons you may email me at eric_colburn (at) brookline (dot) k12 (dot) ma (dot) us or you may bring a written comment to class.
For Wednesday, read chapter 1 and write a comment about a very brief moment that you thought was interesting. Quote brief snippets to help you make your point.
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