Lesson Plan for Week 3: General Thoughts and Notes

Major topics:

1. Thought for the day:

   When Southerners spoke of liberty, they generally meant the birthright to self-determination of one's place in society, not the freedom to defy sacred conventions, challenge long-held assumptions, or propose another scheme of moral or political order.

   — Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South (See this quote with slightly more context.)

2. Administrative Issues:
   • Reminder that the last day to use add codes (for students in the College of Letters & Science) is this Friday afternoon.
   • Things recently on the section Twitter stream: playing the dozens in 20th century music, free copies of several texts mentioned in class over the last week.
   • Reminder: it's always OK to email me to ask what your current grade is.
   • Attendance.
   • Other issues? Questions?
3. Questions for discussion:

   1. Nigger, whut's yo' baby doin' wid gray eyes and yaller hair? (Hurston 17; ch. 2).

      Shucks! Nobody can't tell nothin' 'bout some uh dese bodies, de shape dey's in. Can't tell whether dey's white or black.

      The guards had a long conference over that. After a while they came back and told the men, Look at they hair, when you can't tell no other way. (Hurston 171, ch. 19).

      What assumptions about race are encoded in the quotes above? What view of race is Hurston expressing? What is Hurston's attitude toward these assumptions?

   2. How is Janie's sense of her own subjectivity affected by her membership by her intersecting statuses as both black and female? What is subjectivity? How does Janie's sense of subjectivity change throughout the novel?
   3. What do you see as being the primary thematic concerns in Peter Taylor's The Old Forest (pp. 111 ff. in the course reader)? How does Nat's consciousness change over the course of the story? What causes this change? Why is the story called The Old Forest?
   4. What are recurring concerns for the course so far?
      • feminism
      • gender norms and gender roles
      • class, race, and gender
      • race
      • miscegenation
      • revelations and epiphanies
      • sacrifice
      • economy of desire
      • Biblical and classical literary allusions
      • narrative technique (especially stream of consciousness)
      • setting
      • self-actualization
      • identity
      • conformity
      • power & hierarchies