New posts are for African American Literature!

Two kinds of poets

Being thirteen is pretty rough, but that's especially true for Jason Taylor. His low social standing and embarrassing stammer make him incredibly self-conscious and uncomfortable in any interactions with other kids. But Jason also has a secret: he's a poet. Poetry is an outlet for all of Jason's inner thoughts that he can't communicate with others. Jason's stammer makes it difficult for him to say what he means in front of other people because he's constantly scanning his sentences for trouble words and rewriting his speech to seem normal. Poetry is the only place where Jason can confidently say the things he can't in everyday life. It's interesting to compare Jason with Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They're both young men struggling to find their place in the world, and they're both talented poets, but their attitudes toward the rest of the world are completely different. Stephen thinks that his artistic tal...

Butler's postmodernism

Octavia Butler's Kindred might not appear as startlingly postmodernist as other novels we've read ( Mumbo Jumbo, for example) but her writing presents a powerful challenge to the kind of unilateral, hegemonic narrative that postmodern texts sought to deconstruct. The story unfolds on a Maryland plantation decades before emancipation, grounding Dana's experience in a time when slavery would have felt virtually inescapeable. Dana realizes that the rift between her time and Rufus' time is more than temporal or spatial, but the two environments she's pulled between demonstrate completely different assumptions about humanity. She and Kevin first seek to understand their new environment through their history books from back home, which provide essential information about past laws and regulations. However, the knowledge found in history books can't capture the real experience of living as a slave on Weylin's plantation. Recounting facts about such a brutal era...

it's-almost-summer apathy strikes again

Reading a book about summer while we’re all stuck in school is almost cruel. Here we are, staggering through the last weeks of an insane year, and Benji is off in Sag with tons of time on his hands. This post was supposed to be about Benji’s summer goals, but I’m just going to write about the it’s-almost-summer apathy that comes around this time of year because that’s on my mind. The last weeks of school are both terrible and wonderful. Everyone is burnt out and exhausted from long months of the educational grind, so all our motivation has been replaced by apathy. Each day it’s more difficult to find the will to go to class or finish assignments, but the constant threat of finals keeps us halfway stuck on the academic hamster wheel. Instead of dutifully keeping up with our responsibilities, Uni students use May for a variety of spontaneous activities. Personally, I’ve discovered the wonderful sense of freedom that comes from skipping physics. I’ve also been spending mor...

Goddamn Lyotard!

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