African-American Lit

 Everything after this post is for African-American Literature. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

Holden has unrealistic standards that make him hate almost everyone

     Over the course of our reading J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye,  I have attempted to come up with a clear and simple thesis to Holden Caulfield's worldview. It is not that his view of the world is complicated. It is something that is immediately familiar without being completely explicable or tangible from the first paragraph of his narration. His hatred of movies, of people doing things to make money or because they experience societal pressure to do so, and Holden's disdain for this exemplified through his own refusal to "participate in society" are all reminiscent of so many angsty boy pop-cultural classics. Of course, his positions themselves stem more from his place in society than any removal from it. However, regardless of his perspective's familiarity I still could not really explain exactly what it is that he believes or what drives it. There is no central problem or battle that he is fighting, no underclass that he represents, and no one,...
Read more

Mirrors and Glasses

    In Chapter 23 of Invisible Man, the main character and narrator puts on a hat and a pair of sunglasses to disguise himself from Ras the Exhorter's men, who are trying to find him and beat him up. Throughout the chapter, he is mistaken for a man called Rinehart, who is apparently extremely well known all over Harlem for his roles as "Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend" (498). He puts on many different roles, but always wears the same costume, and so our narrator is mistaken for all of these different versions of the same man while wearing this disguise. During this time our narrator has the realization that he is an invisible man, and that if Rinehart can just walk around being all of these different people, he can pull off something similar. One of the threads that sort of ran through this chapter though but was never really openly discussed was the way that our narrator's ability to see other peop...
Read more