Elit 48 c class 6 post qhq with feminist and lgbt qhq
1. +
ELIT 48C Class # 6
Complement
versus
Compliment
Great
Sweater! It
looks good
with those
jeans!
Thanks!
I just
bought
it!
2. +
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
3. +
AGENDA
Wrap up QHQ Discussion:
Feminist and LGBT Criticism
Lecture:
African American Criticism
Discussion:
QHQs
The Great Gatsby
Author introduction:
Susan Glaspell and Trifles
4. + QHQs Feminist Criticism
1. What role does power play in the
disconnection from patriarchal ideologies?
2. How is feminist criticism associated with
“giving a voice to the voiceless?”
3. How does the patriarchal gender role affect
women in their older years?
4. Why and how are female feminists
undermined by the patriarchy?
5. +QHQs: Gay, Lesbian, Queer Criticism
1. Q: What constitutes an LGBT literary text?
2. Q: Why is queer theory an important and necessary
addition to both gay and lesbian theories?
3. Q: Is it important to know the orientation of the
author before reading the story? Does it have a
huge impact on how the story is read or
understood?
6. + QHQ: similarities and intersections
1. Q: Are there any similarities between the Feminist criticism and
the LGBT criticism?
2. Q: How is Feminist criticism different from LGBT criticism?
3. Q: Does the challenging of traditional gender roles in many
perspectives of feminism exclude/challenge gender
identifications in the LGBTQ community? If so, how can feminist
ideals and LGBTQ ideals resolve the disparity?
4. Q: If femininity/women were not socially constructed as the
lesser in our society, is it possible that homosexuality (at least
for men) may never have become something so unacceptable?
5. Q: How does the patriarchal ideology affect those who do not
identify with either gender?
7. +
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
8. +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.
9. +
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.
10. 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?
11. 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.
12. 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?
13. 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).
14. +
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.
15. +
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.
16. +
Some questions African American
critics ask about literary texts
1. 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?
17. +
More questions African American
critics ask about literary texts
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?
18. +
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 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?
20. +
QHQ: Everyday Racism and Racial Realism
1. Q: How do acts of everyday racism keep
xenophobia alive? Is everyday racism more
crippling for our growth as a society than
transparent acts of racism?
2. Q: Would a person who commits everyday
racism or less subtle, perhaps subconscious
forms of racism still be considered racist?
3. Q: If we know race is socially constructed,
then why do people still feel the need to
identify someone according to their “race”?
4. Q: Seeing as to how the U.S. Census Bureau
has been adding new “races” since 1790, do
you think there will be new “races” added in
the future?
Racial realism is
defined by Tyson as
“the conviction that
racial equality will
never be achieved in
the United States
and that African
Americans should,
therefore, stop
believing that it will.”
(Tyson, 382)
21. + Internalized and Institutionalized Racism
1. Q: Do many people still suffer from internalized
racism?
2. Q: Is the lack of ethnic diversity in American pop
culture responsible for internalized racism?
3. Q: Has society ingrained these pre-destined
stereotypes about race into us, or is it simply
human nature to file those who are [different
from] us under a different category?
4. Q: Does internalized racism hinder the creative
mind of today’s multicultural artist?
5. Q: How does internalized racism and double
consciousness affect how blacks perceive and
accept themselves?
“Internalized racism
often results in intra-
racial racism, which
refers to
discrimination within
the black community
against those with
darker skin and
more African
features.”
22. +
Race as a Social Construction
1. Q: If we know race is socially constructed, then why do
people still feel the need to identify someone according to
their “race”?
2. Q: Seeing as to how the U.S. Census Bureau has been
adding new “races” since 1790, do you think there will be
new “races” added in the future?
3. Q: If race is nothing more than a social construct, then why
would African American literature be qualified as its own
specific type of literature?
23. +
QHQ: African American Criticism
1. Q: Why is the differentiation between using black
vernacular and standard English so important?
2. Q: Why does it seem impossible for a person of
European American ancestry to write intimately
about African Americans (or any other race writing
about any other race)?
3. Q: How does African American criticism help the
majority to understand discrimination?
24. +
Theoretical Intersections
1. How do different systems of oppression intersect with one
another?
2. Is the way a woman looks at feminist criticism similar to the
way an African American looks at African American criticism?
3. Why is racial realism a sickening but very real possibility and
how can it be applied to feminist theory?
25. +Q: Is The Great Gatsby a racist novel?
Being that Harlem was such a bustling source of creativity and of all things
“new,” it seems strange that neither Tom, Daisy, Nick, Jordan, or Gatsby ever
mentions that part of town. As Tyson puts it “From a historical perspective,
such an oversight is virtually impossible. Had Fitzgerald remained true to
form in his description of cultural reality, Nick and his friends would have
visited, or at least mentioned having visited, a Harlem nightclub.” (Tyson,
404)
In fact the only African-American characters Fitzgerald presents is the “ three
modish negroes” in a limousine driven by a white man. Nick, the narrator,
describes them as “two bucks and a girl” and he says that “ he laughed aloud
as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.” (Fitzgerald,
73) Nick’s description of these characters exemplifies a concept that was
explained by Tyson. They serve as a mirror, or a comparison to the
protagonist, in order to make the protagonist look better.
Question: Why or why not would an author be considered a
racist due to the exclusion of racial minority characters?
26. +
Author: Susan Glaspell
On July 1, 1882, Susan Glaspell was born in
Davenport, Iowa. She excelled in academics
as a student, studying Latin and journalism.
After graduation from high school, she worked
as a newspaper reporter for the Davenport
Morning Republican, then as the society editor
for the Weekly Outlook. From 1897-1899 she
attended Drake University and received a
Ph.D. in Philosophy.
27. At the time of her death in 1948, she
had written fifty short stories, nine
novels, and fourteen plays; most of
these works feature strong female
protagonists and stories that focus
on the experiences of women.
Perhaps not surprisingly, her work
faded from public interest during the
conservative1950s, and practically
disappeared from bookshelves and
the stages of amateur theatres. Yet
in the past few decades, her work is
being reexamined and celebrated
by a new group of critics and
audiences.
28. +
HOMEWORK
Read Trifles (1916) pp. 252-262
Post # 6: Choose one
1. In literature, a symbol represents
something else, and is often used to
communicate deeper levels of
meaning. What is one important
symbol in Trifles? How does Glaspell
use it to propel the plot and convey
deeper levels of meaning about her
characters or themes?
2. Write a paragraph or two on how you
might apply any one of the Critical
theories we have discussed to Trifles.
3. How might you read Trifles in
connection with one of the modernist
manifestos?
4. QHQ Trifles