Short assignments (S.A.’s) combine creative inquiry and critical reflection. Though the creative inquiry may vary in terms of time commitment, each S.A. requires a 1-page reflection essay. Do not think of this essay as a formal paper. Instead, recognize that the word “essay” means “to try.” Be willing to take intellectual and creative risks. Your SA may fail, and the essay is a chance for you to learn from the failure. The one page essay is a chance for you to explore problems and try out ideas. Instead of thinking of writing as an academic performance, use it as a form of questioning and discovery. Don’t pretend you have answers when you don’t. Good questions are much more interesting than fake answers. And creative failures often yield more insights than safe successes.
You must complete 10 out of the 11 short assignments. You may use a “pass” on one assignment. Save this pass for a time in the semester when you are most swamped.
W. E. B. Du Bois Dictionary
In the first chapter of Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois introduces two important concepts: “the veil” and “double consciousness.” Although he defines these terms, their meanings are not simple or straightforward. In fact, the concepts are complex and layered, their meanings accruing vertically (through etymological and cultural associations buried in the terms) and horizontally (as he develops their significance across the text). Following the format of an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.), write entries for the terms, “double consciousness” and “veil” for a hypothetical W. E. B. Du Bois dictionary. Provide examples of the terms’ in text usages and identify any variations in meanings through alternate definitions. Bring copies of your entries to class.
Finding Souls in Magazines
Prior to the book publication of Souls of Black Folk in 1903, Du Bois published versions of some chapters in magazines. Find one of his chapters in its original magazine context ( the editor’s footnotes at the beginning of each chapter tell you if and where it was first published). You may use bound periodicals, microfilm, or any digital databases (including Google Books). Once you’ve found the magazine version, compare and contrast it to the corresponding book chapter. Make a list of any notable differences. Look around in the magazine, scanning other articles, editorials, and ads. What can you deduce about the magazine’s audience (race, class, education levels, interests, etc.)? What kinds of attitudes and assumptions about race do you detect in the articles and images? How might Du Bois have been tailoring his essay to this audience? Why do you think he made the changes he did when he published the book? Write a page reflecting on the differences between the magazine and book versions. Bring the essay, along with evidence of your findings, to class on Wednesday.
Plotting the “Coming of John”
Du Bois’s short story, “The Coming of John,” adopts the conventions of naturalism to produce a narrative that is at once realistic and highly structured with striking symmetries and coincidences. Draw a map of plot of the “Coming of John,” plotting the paths of the two Johns and tracing where and when they intersect and diverge.
Incidents of Racial Identification
W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen all recount formative “incidents” from childhood when a boy becomes aware that he is black. These incidents have the force of what Freud calls a “primal scene”—the scene becomes etched in memory, shaping conscious and unconscious behavior for the rest of the person’s life. Write a page comparing and contrasting the three different representations of this definitive moment. What do they have in common? How are they different? What effects, positive or negative, do they have on the child? How do they affect the adult speaker or narrator who recounts them? Make sure to quote from each text.
(Im)personation
Persona: Generally, the speaker (the “I”) in any first-person poem or narrative. The term derives from the Latin word for mask and literally refers to that through which sound passes. Although the persona often serves as the “voice” of the author, it nonetheless should not be confused with the author, for the persona may not accurately reflect the author’s personal opinions, feelings, or perspective on the a subject.
Impersonate: 1. [now rare] to represent in the form of a person; personify; embody; 2. to act the part of; specif. a) to mimic the appearance, manner, etc. of (a person) for purposes of entertainment b) to pretend to be for purposes of fraud.
Personation: …the personation reflects the dual consciousness within readers: the empathy that connects creator and creation, author and poem, effectively constructs a “third Other” who both is and isn’t the author, is and isn’t the speaker of the poem, is and isn’t the reader as “I.” In this way personation distinguishes itself from its closest literary relative, the mask. …the mask fixes an aspect of the poet’s own life upon a character, thereby allowing the poet to wear his or her heart upon someone else’s sleeve, as it were. …the personation is a fluid idea, in part derived from the poet’s life, but given a life of its own. Nor is the personation simply an impersonation, as dictionary definition might suggest, for the personation never counterfeits the real. Instead…the personation creates a new psychic reality culled from the experiences of the poet and the imagined life of the speaker.
Choose one of the poems from this week’s poetry sampler, memorize it, and perform it in class. You will not perform the poem as yourself, however, but in the form of a persona, impersonation, or personation. In other words, you may take on a persona—i.e. don the mask of a speaker other than the poet; impersonate the poet—i.e. act the part of the poet for the purpose of entertainment or fraud; or produce a personation—i.e. create a third poetic identity, a “psychic reality” culled from the documented experiences of the poet, “the imagined life of the speaker,” and your own experiences. You have five minutes (max.) in which to perform a poem (no notes or script). In addition to your performance, you should submit a 1-page reflection indicating whether the performance is a persona, impersonation, or personation, explaining what you discovered in the process of memorizing the poem and what you tried to bring out in its performance.
Acknowledgements: This assignment borrows from Alan Michael Parker and Mark Willhardt, “Blizzard into Text: Contemporary Cross-Gendered Verse,” TriQuarterly, 95 Winter 1995/96), 125-45. Parker and Willhardt theorize personation as something accomplished when a poet writes a cross-gendered poem (i.e. a man writes as a woman or vice versa).
Survey Graphic News Report
Although you must read all the assigned articles, each student will be responsible for reporting to the class about a specific article. This means you should read the article more than once, seeking to understand not only what it says, but also to deduce the article’s explicit and hidden agendas. What audience does the article assume? What are the implicit or explicit gestures toward that audience? What kind of “New Negro” does the article portray? What aspects of African American life or identity does the article emphasize? What does it leave out or seek to repress? What key words does it deploy? How does it incorporate, reference, or contradict any adjacent illustrations? Write a 1-page summary and analysis of your article. Be prepared to report on your article in class and pose 1-2 questions about your article. These questions should concern an issue that you think is important but you don’t have a clear answer to.
Remediation of Fire!!
Choose a poem (or some other text) from Fire!! Using photocopies or scans, redesign a page of the magazine to put the poem next to an illustration. This illustration may come from within Fire!! or from another source. Select a phrase from the poem to serve as a caption for the illustration. Think about the relationship between the text and image. Is it complementary (the text and image suit one another), ironic (the match between image and text create cognitive dissonance), or subversive (the text and images contradict one another or are at cross-purposes). Examine tone, meaning, and metaphors in both text and image. Write a page analyzing how the image alters the meaning of the text and vice versa. How does the text frame the image? Even if the text and image match, how does one influence how we interpret the other? What happens when the texts are remediated and recontextualized? What does your remediation accomplish? What are its limitations?
Acknowledgements: This assignment samples Dr. Mark Sample’s SampleReality.com.
Come to the Cabaret
Remediate a cabaret or bar scene from Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Use whatever tools and technology you have—collage, diorama, PowerPoint, Prezi, Vimeo, etc…—to recreate the scene, supplementing the text with images, sound, video, and/or other texts. You may work collaboratively on this assignment. Write a page reflecting on what you tried to draw out of the novel and what you learned about the narrative in the process of remediating it. How do the images, sounds, moving images, or other texts affect or alter the meaning of the original narrative? How does the narrative frame the related media? Do the various media exist in a complementary, ironic, or subversive relationship to one another? Do the various media court the same audiences? Do they reflect the same attitudes or assumptions about Harlem nightlife? Finally, consider how your remediation succeeds in amplifying the novel, and in what ways it is limited.
Mapping the Narrative
With its themes of passing and migration, and its attention to race and class lines and spaces, Passing is a novella that invites you to think about its own narrative structure. Create a “model” or a “map” — not necessarily a geographic map — that highlights spatial, temporal, thematic, or structural elements of Passing. A “map” does not necessarily have to be a cartographic map. In fact, the last thing I want is a faithful map of all the “places” in the novel. Rather, by “map” I mean a model: an abstract visual representation of some element of the novel that captures its complexity and reveals a pattern or set of relations that a straightforward reading might overlook. You might, for example, make a timeline, map, or schematic diagram of all the letters that get passed. Or try to map the space-time continuum, tracing the geographic movements in relation to the narrative chronology.
In an article called “Graphs, Maps, and Trees,” the critic Franco Moretti makes a case for creating what he calls literary maps:
What do literary maps do . . . First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit — walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever — find its occurrences, place them in space . . . or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them, and construct a new, artificial object. A model. And at this point you start working at a ‘secondary’ level, removed from the text: a map, after all, is always a look from afar — or is useless, like Borges’s map of the empire. Distant reading, I have called this work elsewhere; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Patterns. (New Left Review 26 (2004), p. 94)
There are countless ways to approach this inquiry. For examples of different kinds of mapping visualizations, browse through the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. I encourage you to be creative and to make use of any style or tool necessary. You can be as low-tech or high-tech as you want; your map can be hand-constructed or you can use sophisticated mapping software like Bubbl.us or CMap, or other digital data visualization tools, such as those highlighted here, here, or here.
Whatever form your “map” takes, be sure to include a legend or key that explains the information represented. Once you’ve completed your map and legend, write a 1-page reflection about what your model reveals about Passing. Also, tell us about your thinking process: what element(s) of the novel were you trying to convey, and why did your “map” take the shape it did? Finally, how does your map succeed, and what are its limitations?
Acknowledgements: This assignment samples Dr. Mark Sample’s SampleReality.com.
“Textured” Words
While we often talk about a novel in terms of its broad themes, we can frequently discover rich nuances simply by focusing on individual, highly “textured” words in the text — where they appear, how they are used, what their significance is outside of the text, and what their significance is inside the text. For this investigation you will analyze a single word (including various stems of that word) from Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Think of this assignment as an extreme sports version of close reading. Pick a single “textured” word and trace its use in Their Eyes Were Watching God, either by rereading or by searching Google Books. Note how often the words occurs, in what contexts, how it might be clustered, and any thing else significant about the word’s appearance, prevalence, and relevance. Write a page that considers the patterns that emerge from this word’s use: Is it associated with one character or context? Does its meaning shift throughout the novel? Are there exceptions to the pattern? Are there differences between the literal and symbolic use of the word? Are there tensions between the word’s use in the novel and its use in everyday life? What themes come into focus by concentrating on this individual word?
Acknowledgements: This assignment samples Dr. Mark Sample’s SampleReality.com.
Scholarly Impersonations
Although you must read all the responses to the questionnaire, each student will be responsible for representing the views of one particular scholar. This means you should read that scholar’s response more than once, seeking to understand not only what he or she says, but also to deduce his or her agenda. In class, you will play the role of your scholar Your job is to research your scholarly background and interests and come to class prepared to represent your scholar’s POV in class discussion. The question for discussion will be:
How should the Harlem Renaissance be taught in the 21st century?