Goddamn Lyotard!

Readers have to accept supernatural explanations in order to understand what's going on in Beloved. While ghosts and haunting aren't usually considered "real", they take center stage in the novel and there's no way to appreciate Morrison's work without them. I'm not trying to pull a Scooby Doo and disprove all the fake ghosty stuff, though I've been interested in how the seemingly unexplainable events could have really happened. For example, Stamp Paid suggests that Beloved could be the recently escaped girl who had been locked up by a white man nearby. What if she isn't the ghost of Sethe's crawling-already? baby come back to torment her, but just another abused girl with no place to go? Following the end of slavery, Paul D rationalizes that the whole nation is full of displaced people, and Beloved could be another one of them. Beloved does have some characteristics that line up clearly with the baby (unlined hands, marks on the forehead, c...

My favorite part of any English class is reading and responding to literary criticism. After we've spent weeks discussing and dissecting a novel, I love the opportunity to read what other scholars and critics have to say about the text. However, in this class I've been frustrated to note that most of the literary criticism we've read on foundational works such as Native Son, Invisible Man, and Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on narrowly defining literature's role, rather than responding to the texts themselves. First the (white) critic Irving Howe insists that black writers cannot possibly "think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest", and then Richard Wright slams Zora Neale Hurston for failing to "move in the direction of serious fiction." Both Wright and Howe subscribe to a rigid insistence that literature is merely a tool with which one can realize political goals. This insistence frustrates me because, in my opinion, literature i...