Literature Journal (‘Everyday Use’ Alice Walker)

1. Alice Walker is a very quiet soul. Her view of the world is mystical and beautiful. Race to her is the colour of flowers, and racism is something ridiculous and completely avoidable. Violence is futile and horrible. The spirits of the world hold all and change all and move all. Women have feared to be public about anything because of the death of that grandmotherly spirit. That spirit was killed when so many witch-hunts killed those who would speak up for her.

2. The story is tragically and painfully real.  The more beautiful one is, the more one is given in life. Furthermore, in trying to find our ‘roots’ we lose the fact that our roots are where we were raised, not where our blood came from.  Ms Walker’s writing has a simple elegance about it.

3. Maggie and the narrator wait for Maggie’s sister (the narrator’s daughter) to arrive. Maggie and Dee are quite opposite; Maggie is crippled; Dee is beautiful. Dee has been given everything in the wold. She arrives with a new man (presumably her recent conjugate), and announced that she has a new name in order to embrace her roots. She, after dining with the family, begins to beg for things to have from the house, including a beautiful set of old quilts made from her grandmother’s old dresses. These were promised to Maggie, and were left to stay with Maggie.

4. Primary: Narrator – large, manly, mother, uneducated, insecure; Maggie – crippled, burned, ugly, speech impaired, unintelligent, kind; Dee – beautiful, confident, cocky, selfish, inconsiderate, entitled. Secondary: Barber – Muslim, activist, short, stocky, engaged or married to Dee; John Thomas – engaged to Maggie, mossy teeth, earnest face.

5. Old house moved into after a fire consumed the house the characters lived in before. Around the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

6. First person, Majour Character

7. ashamed, scars, comfortable, TV shows, envy, hands, tongue, animal, dress, house, snake, name, Model A, dash, quilt, old, sunglasses, understand; the house burning  could symbolise a changing life; the quilts are an archetype for what is valuable in life.

8. The mood is uneasy, clumsy, yet charmingly confident and strong. This dichotomy plays well into the story as well as revealing the mind of both the mother and Maggie.

9. Three main ideas: beauty vs. homeliness, change and chance, and the desire to return to African roots.

10. The sentences are a series of short sentences followed by small increments in the size. These sporadic longer sentences elongate as the story proceeds. The style is informal.

Literature Journal (‘Sonny’s Blues’ James Baldwin)

1. James Baldwin is a very subtle, gentle, and strong personality. I love his ideas on race. The whites do segregate the blacks into their own progressively worsening society for fear of mingling with them. He also has a very balanced view of life – its sorrows and its joys. Furthermore, his equation of ‘black’ to barbaric behaviour is daring and accurate in the white mind. A change must come.

2. He has an elegance about his writing – the sort of elegance that is acquired. I felt entranced and delighted by anything that he wrote. I loved the characters; I found myself relating to a situation that was completely alien to my own.

3. The narrator finds in the newspaper that his younger brother, Sonny, has been sent to jail for his addictions. The narrator flashes back to life up to that point (Sonny’s musicianship and old friends). When Sonny comes back from prison, he meets his family and friends to find that he is no longer equipped for the life that he lives. When he begins to play in a pub, he is completely useless at his art, but as time goes by, he regains his skills and finds emotional release through his blues.

4. Primary: Narrator – unnamed, algebra teacher, married, father, from projects, refined; Sonny – younger brother, extraordinary musician, quiet, relatively handsome, addict, misguided, misfit. Secondary: Father – stern, quiet; Mother – concerned, religious, loving; Sonny’s friend: withered, wiry, beggar, prideful. Creole: large, friendly, musician.

5. Within the projects. Small apartments are bought because that is how people were raised. Area is stagnant and dark.

6. First person.

7. black, hymns, songs, jazz, reminded, quiet, assorted songs. singing, woman, piano.  The songs played detail the emotions revolving during the story (‘Lord, you brought me from a long way off,’ ‘You going to need me, baby, one of these cold, rainy days,’ etc.). Furthermore, the final sequence of Sonny’s blues playing reveals the change in his own character. His first awkwardness and unhappiness show how his life was before; his loosening afterwards show his comfort with new surrounding – a purification to his former self – , as well as a reversion to the old way of life.

8. The mood shifts from uneasiness to unhappiness to comfort. The entire piece has a frightened elegance.

9. Religious and racial ideas are discussed. The characters live in the projects and deal with the inherited ideals and formulas of life lived therein.  The religious plays in with the mother and her angst to see her sons grow up well.

10. The sentences vary from medium to long with a very professional, yet tender, voice.

 

Literature Journal (‘Shiloh’ Bobbie Ann Mason)

1. The video as a long stream of violins, pianos, and dead time. Too much of the time was spent discussing the wonderful features of the park. ‘Interpretive centre’? ‘The one stream represents our nation as a hole’? What?! ‘We just would like to just have our visitors to just think about what has…’ I don’t give a grape about when they’re open.

2. The first sentence intrigued me. Interest waned as they spoke through these mundane conversations with annoyingly repetitive characters.  With the noticing of the repetitive characters, I realised the intelligence of the narrator.  Every human is annoying once one has gotten to know it. The present tense was both tantalizing and annoying. The end was desperately hopeful.

3. Leroy and Norma Jean are introduced. They are at home. Leroy goes to the store and sees the son of a upperclassmen when he was in school – a son that would be about the age of their child had he lived. He comes back home to find Mabel, Norma Jean’s mother, at home discussing ceaselessly the urge to go to Shiloh national park out of patriotic interest. Norma Jean is obsessed with her physical; Leroy is obsessed with building a log cabin now that he’s disabled; Mabel is obsessed with Shiloh. Mabel catches Norma Jean smoking. Norma Jean and Leroy go to Shiloh where she tells him that she wants to separate. He closes his eyes as she walks off into the distance and either beckons him to her or is doing some sort of exercise.

4. Principal: Leroy – truck-driver, injured, obsessed with a utopian life, clueless, worried, loving; Norma Jean – obsessed with self-improvement, determined, uneasy, cluttered, unhappy. Secondary: Mabel – obsessive, manipulative, egotistical, short, intrusive; Stevie – skinny, drugged, dealer, sloppy; Randy – infant, dead.

5. Small house, store, Shiloh, dead people, sixties are past (glory days past).

6. Third-person limited

7. dumbbells, truck, injured, highway, accident, death, home, cabin, joint, cigarette, Dr. Strangelove, Star Trek, kitchen, assorted foods, question, baby, killed, Shiloh, shut up, name, Confederate, April 7, 1862, battleground, bed.

8. The mood is uneasy, muddled, and colloquial. The entire thing is stuffed with latent and frustrating emotion.

9. Independence is a great underlying theme, as well as its reciprocal. The constant want for release is central. Manipulation and underlying self-hatred is highly evident. Unhappiness is the most central theme, though.

10. The writing style is colloquial and conversational. The sentences are short and frequently punctuated with any longer than ten words. 70% consists of conversation.The narrative style is regional and era centred.

Literature Journal (‘The Storm’ Kate Chopin)

1. As the story began, I was bored and irritated by the accents. As the story proceeded, I was more intrigued by the characters and the events proceeding. The final two sections, in which the two cover up their tracks masterfully, intrigued me. Kate Chopin is obsessed with affairs.

2. Bibi and Bobinot decide to stay in the store until the storm passes. Meanwhile at the house, Bobinot’s wife (Calixta) is visited by an old lover alone. They kiss and cuddled, and he rode away. Bobinot and Bibi come back home and suspect nothing; she is an ideal wife. Alcee, the lover, writes to his wife informing her of his wish that she stay where she is for another month. Calixta, in turn, writes to her husband (who she is gone from) to inform her of the babies and know that in herself she has suspended her marriage periodically.  She would be in bliss soon.

3. Primary: Bobinot, husband, French, un-patronising; Calixta, calm, closeted, passionate, good wife, relieved, French; Alcee, forward, smoothe, bored, French. Secondary, Clarisse, daughter; Bobi, four, smart, wise-looking, son.

4. Rain, store/home/bay/cistern-by-the-house, storm, warm.

5. Third-person editorial omniscient.

6. rain, door, store, uneasiness, clothes, water, couch, warm, beat, dripping, satisfaction, table, pleasure, conjugal.

7. The mood is muddy, warm, and wet. The story seems to sludge from some scenes, while leaving each detail in pointed detail. The general effect is akin to the smile of Mona Lisa.

8. Satisfied conjugal happiness contrasts with the thick passion of unsatisfied eroticism.

9. Sentence length ranges from medium length to long. The language of the narrative itself is professional, while the dialogue is regional.

10. The video was unrelated to the true subject matter of the story, and was therefore a deplorable waste of my time – a twenty-eight minute waste of my time. What the video said about same-sex marriage was not Chopin’s point in ‘The Storm.’ Chopin was dealing with an outright rebellion; same-sex marriage is a matter of worldview. Calixta knew what she was doing.