• http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2014/11/25

• http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/obama-speaks-on-the-ferguson-decision-20141124

English 213Week 10

Hands up!Don’t Shoot

#BlackLivesMatter

“I should want the History of my childhood and the first five years [of my escape] in one volume and the next three and my home in the northern states in the second”-Jacobs to Stowe

For at the heart of U.S. literary supremacy, Jacobs suggests, at the heart of believing that the Other may be read like an open book, lies an even more fundamental misunderstanding of the workings of power in the modern United States. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl might usefully be read as Jacobs’s evisceration of Stowe’s fantasy of the consent of the ‘lowly’ to their subordination – Stowe’s vision of both a preindustrial past and an imperial future organized around a strict, yet natural ideal, hierarchy in which deference is freely is exchanged for paternal protection. To counter Stowe’s imaginative order, Jacobs establishes in Incidents a motif of homelessness that threatens Linda Brent from the first page to the last, and in so doing she casts a de-romanticizing light on the central figure of Stowe’s novelistic alchemy, the cabin of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by exposing the lie of Stowe’s title […] Against Stowe’s mania for godlike aggrandizement at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the unfulfilled and insistent desire of the dispossessed radiates outward from the final page of Jacobs’s book.

-Jennifer Rae Greeson

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition. The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for my own. But God so orders circumstances as to keep me with my friend Mrs. Bruch. Love, duty, gratitude, also bind me to her side. It is a privilege to serve her who pities my oppressed people, and who has bestowed the inestimable boon of freedom on me and my children.

Term 2Unit 4: The WesternWeek 1: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (Hackett)Week 2: Owen Wister, The Virginian and Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

Unit 5: The GothicWeek 3: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Sigmund Freud, from “The Uncanny” (excerpt)

Week 4: Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”

Unit 6: NaturalismWeek 5: Frank Norris, McTeagueWeek 6: Reading weekWeek 7: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Unit 7: ModernismWeek 8: Gertrude Stein, Three LivesWeek 9: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black FolkWeek 10: John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer