In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois famously described the African American psyche in terms of double consciousness–two warring ideals in one body, yoked together by violence alone. The African self and the American self always in conflict, but desiring to be merged into a single, higher self. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, DuBois’s colleague, James Weldon Johnson, offers a slightly different framework for black experience–the freemasonry of the race. Johnson’s concept implies that blackness consists of a set of secret signs, rituals, and common experiences, much like participation in a society of free masons. Johnson’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, the ex-colored man who narrates the novel, is fair-skinned enough that he eventually chooses to pass as white. This experience leads him sometimes to long for connection with other black people.
Albion Tourgee vs. Booker T. Washington
Tourgee and Washington both emphasize the importance of education in elevating Southern black people during Reconstruction. Much of Tourgee’s Bricks Without Straw revolves around the creation of a school for the black children of Red Wing. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, chronicles his own education at Hampton and his founding of Tuskegee. Tourgee and Washington, however, disagree on the importance of politics. While Washington eschewed a career in politics for one in education, Tourgee emphasizes how white Southerners forced black men out of politics and contested their voting rights. Whereas Tourgee portrays Southern whites as being hostile to black voters and politicians, as well as their white allies, Washington focuses on harmony between the races. For Washington, commercial interdependence, such as when white Southerners buy bricks from Tuskegee, is more essential than political participation.
Sympathy vs Conscience
There is an interesting transition from a mid-nineteenth century emphasis on sympathy to a late-nineteenth century focus on conscience. Sentimental novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and slave narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seek to arouse the reader’s sympathy. By portraying the suffering of the enslaved, authors like Stowe and Jacobs moved readers to feel compassion for the victims and righteous anger for the villains. Realist novels a couple of decades later, however, focus more on the individual’s conscience. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham both feature protagonists wrestling with their consciences. Twain emphasizes the fallibility of conscience, as Huck’s makes him feel wrong for helping Jim escape slavery. Howells’s novel portrays the conflict between sympathy and conscience, as Rodgers evokes Silas’s sympathy for his wife in trying to persuade him to a shady business deal. Charles Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition wants to evoke sympathy for the plight of African Americans during the “redemption” of the South by white supremacists, but it is more interested in exploring the process by which Southerners appeased their own consciences while defrauding, disenfranchising, and lynching their black neighbors.
On Christian Slave Owners: Stowe vs. Douglass
Harriet Beecher Stowe portrays Christianity as a positive influence on slave owners. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Emily Shelby educates her slaves and comes to doubt the validity of the institution itself because she is a Christian. Little Eva’s abundant kindness to Tom and the rest of her father’s slaves also stems from her Christianity. Conversely, Stowe characterizes non-believers, like Simon Legree, as cruel and debauched. Frederick Douglass, however, presents the situation as being exactly opposite. Douglass argues that Christians make the worst slave owners because their brand of religion only reinforces their sense of their absolute mastery over their slaves.
On Merchants: Parker vs Brownson
Theodore Parker and Orestes Brownson both address the growing power of the rising commercial class in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. Defining merchants as those who profit, not form their own labor, but from the labor of others, both Parker and Brownson see this class as central to reforming the nation. While in “A Sermon of Merchants” Parker exhorts merchants to use their influence righteously, Brownson in “The Laboring Classes” wants to dismantle their power by abolishing the inheritance of property.
Dimmesdale vs. Hooper
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter and Father Hooper from “The Minister’s Black Veil” have a kind of inverse relationship. Dimmesdale is tormented with guilt for a sin which he is unable to confess. He is beloved by his parishioners and believed to be a paragon of piety. Father Hooper, who refuses to explain why he wears a black veil over his face, terrifies and alienates his parishioners by the veil’s symbolic suggestion of hidden sin.
Film Analysis: Memento
Purpose and Goals:
In this assignment, you will analyze the significance of time in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. This assignment will give you the opportunity to perform a literary analysis, develop your competency in audio-visual literacy, and incorporate scholarly sources into your own argument. This piece should be about 1,500 words.
Interpretation and Analysis:
This is not a film review, but rather an interpretive piece, so you do not need to summarize the plot of the film. You might focus on any number of issues related to the theme of time in the film: Why does Memento unfold in reverse chronological order? What is Leonard’s understanding of the relationship between memory, meaning, and selfhood? How do the audience’s perceptions toward the characters shift as the film progresses?
Incorporation of Scholarly Sources:
I will provide you with two scholarly articles about the film, which you must incorporate into your argument. You should not merely summarize these pieces, but rather treat them as conversation partners. Whether you agree or disagree with these scholars’ arguments, you must succinctly explain what they are arguing. If you disagree with their arguments, then you must explain why they are flawed. If you agree with their arguments, then you must explain how they support your own argument. You should accurately summarize the scholars’ arguments, but do not simply repeat them without offering a contribution of your own.
Audio-visual Literacy:
Your analysis should consider traditional literary elements of the film, such as setting, dialogue, plot, symbolism, and character development, as well as its audio-visual nature: how do the cinematography, editing, and score contribute to the film’s view of time?
Grading:
This assignment will comprise 10% of your final grade. The first draft will not be graded, but if you do not turn it in on time you may fail the assignment. I will comment on the first draft to guide your revision. The second draft will receive a letter grade.
News Article Assignment
Purpose and Goals:
Now that we have read news articles from several sources in class you will write one of your own. The goal of this assignment is for you to learn the conventions of journalistic prose and apply them to a topic of your choice. To avoid the temptation to plagiarize, you will not write about a current event. Instead, you will write your news article about an historical event, such as the battle of Gettysburg, or a fictional one, such as the execution of Sydney Carton, so long as it uses voice, tone, and style appropriate to reporting the news. You may use an event from a book, film, or television show as the basis for your news article.
Audience and Conventions:
Your news article should adhere to the generic conventions we discussed in class, including
- Content
- Topic should be “news worthy”: your article should cover an event that has some political, economic, or social significance. This will vary depending on whether you are writing for a local, regional, national, or international news outlet
- Provide enough detail to keep the piece interesting, but avoid going into minutiae
- Style
- Write for a broad audience
- Open with a summary of the event and its significance
- Present the most important information first
- Incorporate quotations from experts and/or eyewitnesses. If your article is about a fictional event, use quotations from the text. If you write about an historical event, you can fabricate quotations from eyewitnesses, but they must be plausible.
- Paragraphs should be relatively short and language should be concise
- Use qualified language (i.e. “experts say” or “may be the case”)
- Use third-person voice and neutral, “objective” tone
- Format
- Headline should encapsulate the main point of the article
- Byline: your name and the date should be immediately below the headline; identify the newspaper, which can be fictitious, in which your article appears
- Text should be in 12 point font, left-justified, and single-spaced with one space between paragraphs
- Any images should be incorporated smoothly into the text
- 750 words
- Prose should be free of spelling, grammatical, and mechanical errors
Grading:
This assignment will comprise 5% of your total grade for the course. You will be graded on these three areas:
- Content—30%
- Style—50%
- Format—20%
To receive full credit in each of these areas you must skillfully use all of the relevant conventions. Partial credit will be awarded for using some of the conventions well and others poorly. Little or no credit will be given where few or none of the conventions are observed.
American Political Rhetoric
The Novice-as-Expert
One key to students’ making the transition from high school to college writing revolves around what Sommers and Laura Saltz call the “novice-as-expert paradox” (134). According to Sommers and Saltz in “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshmen Year,” freshmen “build authority not by writing from a position of expertise but by writing into expertise” (134). Students must assume the role of expert or adopt the voice of authority which they do not yet possess. This observation recalls a similar claim made by David Bartholomae. Sommers and Saltz argue that students’ lack of expertise results in the “prevalence of the descriptive thesis in freshmen writing” (134). A descriptive thesis “names or reports on phenomena rather than articulating claims based on analysis of the evidence” (134). Students write descriptive theses rather than truly analytic ones because they must devote so much energy to comprehending the subject matter. Yet, Sommers and Saltz do not see this as a failure, so much as a “symptom of a novice working on an expert’s assignment” (135). The data from Sommers and Saltz’s longitudinal study of Harvard students suggests that the most successful students embrace the idea that they are novices being trained as experts. Although “asking freshmen to do the work of experts invites imitative rather than independent behavior” (135) it enables students to practice the skills which they will employ as experts.
Sommers and Saltz’s findings suggest that it may be beneficial for instructors to explicitly frame their courses in terms of stages on the path from novice to expert. Moreover, instructors can show students examples of descriptive theses and analytic ones to help them understand the level at which they are being asked to engage with their sources. Some students will still have trouble writing analytic theses, but they will begin to apply vocabulary from the course to their own writing. Instructors can scaffold assignments so that students first practice summarizing material, then learn to synthesize the arguments of others, and finally make arguments of their own. Sommers and Saltz observe that many freshmen embrace writing as an opportunity to participate in a wider conversation about important issues. It is essential for instructors to help students conceive of their arguments as forays into this larger discourse, rather than mere exercises.
