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ELIT 48C Class # 23

Complement versus Compliment

Great Sweater! It looks good with those jeans!

Thanks! I just bought it!

+Grammar Slide

Complement is a noun or verb that means something that completes or makes up a whole: “The red sweater is a perfect complement to the outfit.”

Compliment is a noun or verb that means an expression of praise or admiration: “I received compliments about my new red sweater.”

Easily Confused or Misused Words | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0200807.html#ixzz2T7S5NSIg

+AGENDA

Chair poetry

African American (Minority) CriticismLectureDiscussion

Friday: The Great Gatsby11:00 am at the AMC Cupertino square 16.

+Chair Poet of the Day?

Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the bestorder.- S. T. Coleridge

+Toni Morrison: American novelist, American literary critic, editor, and professor.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. : American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual

African American Criticism

+The following perspectives help identify African-American criticism

African American criticism notes that black writing comes out of a sociological, political, ideological, and cultural situation marked by oppression and marginalization. “Black” reading then must negotiate the difficult boundaries between textual and cultural meanings.Black criticism has substantial ties to post-colonial

criticism, and to the issues in it of the representation of the 'other” and the reclamation of identity in the forms and language of the oppressor.

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African American criticism has an awareness that black experience has ties to African language, cultural practices, and attitudes, that it is formed through the experience of slavery and violence, that it has endured a long and troubled negotiation with white culture, so that black artistic production in white cultures is marked by white culture positively and negatively.

African American criticism is a struggle over the relation of race, reading, and critical theory, similar in some respects to that of feminist theory: Who “speaks for” blacks? Can only blacks “read” black

literature? Can black literature be read with the

tools of contemporary criticism, or does it demand a more basic, moral and ideological commitment?

African American criticism examines how white writing in racist countries reveals the nature of the oppression of blacks.

Toni Morrison, for instance, argues that American culture is built on, and always includes, the presence of blacks, as slaves, as outsiders. Morrison likens the unwillingness of academics in a racist society to see the place of Africanism in literature and culture to the centuries of unwillingness to see feminine discourse, concerns, and identity.

She posits whiteness as the “other” of blackness, a dialectical pair (each term both creates and excludes the other): no freedom without slavery, no white without black.

African American criticism is also an attempt to come to terms with the whole issue of what “race” is.

Historically race has been seen as something essential. That race is inherent, a matter of 'blood', was and is firmly believed by Americans, is clear from the recent autobiography of an American, Gregory Howard Williams, now Dean of the Law School at Ohio State, Life on the Color Line, a man who looks white, and whose father passed as Italian in Virginia, where his family was not known. He was, in Virginia, accepted and treated as white, but he was treated as black (and hence was the victim of exclusion and other prejudicial behavior) when the family returned to their home town of Muncie, Indiana: there they knew that his grandmother was black; therefore, he was black.

When is white black?-- When you have some “black blood”? Or when people know or think you have black blood?

As a subject matter, any analysis of a literary work written by an African American, regardless of the theoretical framework used, might be called African American criticism, even if no attention is paid to elements in the text that are specifically African American.

However, as a theoretical framework [. . .] African American criticism foregrounds race (racial identity, African American cultural traditions, psychology, politics, and so forth) as the object of analysis because race, in America, informs our individual and cultural psychology, and therefore our literature, in profound ways. As a theoretical framework, then, African American criticism can be used to analyze any literary text that speaks to African American issues, regardless of the race of its author, although the work of African American writers is the primary focus (Tyson 394).

+Important Terms

 In The Souls of Black Folk, arguably W.E.B. DuBois’s most famous work, he introduces and addresses two concepts that describe the quintessential Black experience in America. The first is the concept of “the veil. ” The veil concept primarily refers to three conditions

of racial difference:  The literal darker skin of Blacks, which is a physical

demarcation of difference from whiteness.  White people’s lack of clarity to see Blacks as “true”

Americans.  Blacks’ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of what

white America describes and prescribes for them.

+Important Terms

The second concept that Debois introduces is “double-consciousness.” This concept is inextricably intertwined with “the veil.”

The veil dampens the view of both Blacks and Whites, yet Blacks traditionally have a better understanding of whites than the reverse because of the “two-ness” lived by Black Americans. Understanding being Black and what that has historically meant (or means) in America, Black people know they operate in two Americas— one that is White and one that is Black. This is the phenomena of “double-consciousness,” the awareness of the “two-ness” of being both American and African American and the largely unconscious and instinctive shifts between the these two identities.

+ Some questions African American critics ask about literary texts1. What can the work teach us about the specifics of African heritage, African American culture and experience, and/or African American history? 

2. What are the racial politics (ideological agendas related to racial oppression or liberation) of specific African American works?

Does the work correct stereotypes of African Americans? Does it correct historical misrepresentations of African Americans? Does it celebrate African American culture, experience, and

achievement? Does it explore racial issues, including, among others, the

economic, social, or psychological effects of racism? Or, does it, as can be seen in the literary production of many white

authors, does the work reinforce racist ideologies?

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3. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of specific African American works?

Does the work use black vernacular or standard white English? Does the work draw on African myths or African American

folktales or folk motifs? Does the work provide imagery that resonates with African

American women’s domestic space, African American cultural practices, history, or heritage?

What are the effects of these literary devices, and how do they relate to the theme, or meaning, of the work?

+4. How does the work participate in the African American literary tradition? In short, what place does it occupy in African American literary history or in African American women’s literary history?

5. How does the work illustrate interest convergences, the social construction of race, white privilege, or any other concept from critical race theory? How can an understanding of these concepts deepen our interpretation of the work?

6. How is an Africanist presence—black characters, stories about black people, representations of black speech, images associated with Africa or with blackness—used in works by white writers to construct positive portrayals of white characters?

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Discussion

African American Criticism Gwendolyn

Brooks: An American Poet1917-2000

Ralph EllisonAmerican novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer1913-1994

+QHQ: African American Criticism

Why is it relevant to talk about African American Criticism?

Does it limit African-American artists to say that racial and/or political statements are more important than entertainment, “art for art’s sake,” or another motivation?

Why would black writers feel the need to write in proper English rather than their own language [vernacular]?

Why was it important for black writers to have a double consciousness?

Why are people of color, according to the African American criticism, sometimes considered oversensitive when offended by issues that are considered racist by them?

How does reading African American criticism help broaden our views of how literature has been affected by the social structures of race?

+For Discussion

I wanted to discuss the idea of intra-racial racism. This is something I have never heard in any other criticism or book before. However, it is something that I have seen in real life. This concept is not subjective to only African Americans, in fact in many races there are individuals who feel that they superior to others of their same race. This, in my opinion, destroys the sense of unity that is needed in order to stop oppression.

Does intra-racial racism attribute to the double consciousness?

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Consider one of our previous texts through the lens of African American Criticism.

+The Great Gatsby

In chapter four, Gatsby takes Nick in hurtling in his car towards Manhattan with “fenders spread like wings” to witness the power his money has bought him. In less than a page, the narrator Nick makes several pejorative comments that address aspects of race and ethnicity, noting friends of a dead man who had “…the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe,” as well as introducing us to Gatsby’s colleague, Mr. Wofsheim, who he describes as a “small, flat-nosed Jew.” Tom and Daisy are never described in terms like these, the presumption being that being white and Protestant is normal and not worth mentioning; any deviation is potentially suspect and worth keeping a close eye on. In this passage, Nick notices something he finds extraordinary: “As we crossed Blackwell’s Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry. ‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all…’” This is incredibly disturbing! Is the narrator as racist as this passage would lead one to believe? Is the narrator expressing sentiments that Fitzgerald espoused?

+The Great Gatsby

There is a scene in the book in the beginning when Tom is reading a book called “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by a man named “Goddard.” Tom tells Nick that “civilization’s going to pieces” and that it is “scientifically proven.” I think this is a form of institutionalized racism, since this book that Tom is reading seems to have made it into the canon and the fact that it is “scientifically proven” seems like the dominant race in America, the whites, are trying really hard to keep the black people in place.

+My Ántonia

Applying African-American Criticism to My Antonia, one can see d’ Arnault falls very cleanly into one of the many “character types” that are mentioned in the book on criticism: “the local healer, the conjurer, the matriarch, the local storyteller, the trickster, the religious leader, and the folk hero” (386). Samson D’ Arnault clearly is the folk hero. In My Antonia, when he plays piano, he is described as “some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” (118). He is the folk hero who is prodigiously talented at playing piano. (“He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully” (117).) This exotic image of d’ Arnault as foreign and fascinating is akin to the African-American version of Orientalism. Also, since d’ Arnault is not recently from Africa, this image of being an African god suggests the piece of African-American criticism that hearkens back to Africa itself.

+“I, Too” [I want to] take a psychoanalytic approach along with the minority

lens. The text for homework discussing the criticism brought up some interesting points, in black history as well as the present state of the continued racial injustices of today along with the internalized oppression. The poem “I, too” does not display internalized oppression but rather the opposite, and a mindset that differs others from the idea that they are truly inferior to the white race. The speaker says, “Tomorrow…/they will see how beautiful we are/and be ashamed” showing confidence and having a subtle implication that others should feel the same way. Even though this poem is modern there still seems to be a bit of forceful suggestion about how blacks should feel about themselves in the oppressive society in which they live and always look toward tomorrow instead of focusing on the norms of their day that degrade them; and to not allow the pressures of the oppressive world intrude into their psyche. This poem clearly opposes the residency of internalized oppression within the black mind by suggesting that the white race someday will see their beauty and realize their awesome significance and strength as a people and community.

+HOMEWORK

Post #23: Briefly consider one of our previous texts through one critical lens: New Criticism, Feminism, Marxism, or African American Criticism. Focus on a particular passage.

Familiarize yourself with potential topics for essay #1