LITR 5731 Seminar in Multicultural Literature
American Minority Literature
Lecture Notes
HJ on inter-race: 1.2, 1.3, 1.6; 14.1
1.2 mulattoes, merchandise
1.3 maternal grandmother, daughter of a planter, freed,
returned
1.5 bake crackers at night
1.6 Anglo-Saxon ancestors
1.7 slave, being property, can hold no property (cf. women)
1.12 future . . . what they would do with me
1.13 taught me to read and spell
3.6 happy free women
3.7 children torn from her
5.2 subdue = seduce?
5.3 vile monster, sacred commandments of nature
5.4 no shadow of law
5.5 beauty as greatest curse; admiration > degradation
5.7 silence or death
5.9 [private influence of grandmother; cf. Fuller]
5.11 two beautiful children playing together
6.1 [family dynamics disrupted]
6.3 literacy as trap
6.20 I was touched by her grief; incapable of feeling, not
very refined (class difference)
6.22 color of his soul! (color code)
6.22 rejoice to live in town; contrast supposedly romantic
plantation
6.23 whispers
6.26 romantic notions of a sunny clime
6.27 children as property, marketable as pigs
6.29 deadens moral sense in white women
7.3 laws no sanction to marriage
7.16 romantic codes of honor
7.20-21 rights?
7.31 marriage no protection
7.32 get to the north
10.6 confuses all principles of morality
10.7 different standards
14.6 double minority
14.8 no claim to a name
14.11 genealogies of slavery (skeins metaphor)
14.12 chains metaphor
21.1 gothic? Attic
21.4 all must be done in darkness
21.5 verisimilitude x romanticism
41.9 domesticity—home of my own
Morrison
pleasure of company of someone who’s smarter than you are but
wants and encourages your company
fiction / stories as learning how to live in world
fearlessness / shock but cool or deadpan--yet also delicacy
negative capacity: strong characters, independent of each
other, not all same
mythic stature of characters
individualized, not stereotypical, yet stand for something
like they're the only people in the world
surprising
love of language
expansion of sensorium 173 (ch. 8)
40-41 black, rainbow
47 purple
185 deeper darkness
Gretchen: physicality
obsessive themes but never limiting
humanizes Macon Sr.
comic seriousness
humor p. 54 humor humanizes
difficulty of book:
no role model, no standard
Pilate, but problem of Reba and Hagar
196 she didn’t know any grown-up women
Notes on
Song of Solomon
67-68 [Oedipal drama]
Loss, separation
absence of navel, problem of origins; need to know story (cf. Dream)