African-American Lit

 Everything after this post is for African-American Literature. 

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Families belonging to each other in Beloved

     One of the most commonly recurring phrases in our reading for Thursday from Beloved  was "she is mine," or some variation of it. This was used primarily about Beloved the character, but also in reference to Sethe. At first, I found this phrase confusing and did not understand why it was used so many times. However, during the section from Paul D's perspective, there was a passage that sort of clarified it for me. The passage is about family and the way that he views people's families because he wasn't raised in one. It says, "he made them identify over and over who each [person] was, what relation, who in fact, belonged to who." (258)      The way that Paul D talks about belonging here made the repetition in the earlier chapters of the phrase "she is mine" make more sense to me. These characters need to affirm that they belong to each other, and therefore that they belong to the family. When Sethe asserts that Beloved is hers, she is reaff...
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The Okeechobee Hurricane

    Their Eyes Were Watching God  is absolutely full of detail. It has so much information about the places it discusses, and the cultures and people that they represent, which all ties back to Hurston's anthropological work. She is an expert in this exact kind of detail, and you can tell through her writing. She is specific and intentional in her presentation of people and the places that they live, as well as the things that happen there. In Chapter 18, Janie and Tea Cake experience an extremely strong and devastating hurricane. They ignore several signs that it could be damaging and end up having to go through the storm to get to safety when it eventually does get bad. It is a very intense incident, and the way that the storm is discussed is almost supernatural. The natural forces around Janie and Tea Cake are described as "cosmic," called "beast[s]" and "monster[s]." The lake and hurricane "roar" and "rag[e]."  One sentence desc...
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Esther's story is really not universal and I kind of like that

    The story of The Bell Jar  is fundamentally one about mental health and the fairly severe six-month psychological break that Esther experiences during it. Many coming-of-age protagonists suffer mental health issues, Holden Caulfield, for example, definitely had some stuff going on and we theorized that he might be in a mental hospital while telling the story of The Catcher in the Rye . However, the severity of Esther's illness is something that I think is quite rare, in other words, this is not a universalizing coming-of-age narrative. Sylvia Plath is not trying to access some sort of essence of adulthood and convey it to the reader, she is telling the story of one specific person, arguably herself.      It is undeniably true that people can relate to Esther Greenwood and her struggles. After all, many of the issues that she struggles to reconcile are larger sociocultural problems that affect many women of her generation, race, and status. It is also tr...
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