AS AM 5 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Stanley Baldwin, Robert E. Lee, Resonance
12 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
AS AM 5
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Sameer Pandya
Class: TR 11-12:15 (girv 1004)
Office hours: HSSB 5038, R 9-11
Email: [email protected]
Midterm: 10/30/18
Final*: 12/12/18
HW:
Sonny’s Blues (CR)
Focus of Nationhood and concept of minorities
●What it means to engage in notion of americans
●Engaging from a place of being an ethnic minority
American lit tradition: explicit vs. implicit
●Question of americanness
Ralph Ellison: As I see it, the novel has always been bound up with the idea of nationhood.
What are we? Who are we? What has been the experience of the particular group been? How
did it become this way? What is it that stopped us from attaining the ideal?
●Return to question of national collectivity: successes & failures
○Reflection of what ideals (ex Declaration of Independence)
Jasper Johns’
Flag
painting, 1967
●Abstraction of an idea and a symbol. What does it become after paint/written
●2 step b/w reality and illusion
○The events of Vietnam, the importance of the context of the work
○This one is diff than those of 30 years before
Glenn Ligon’s
Double America
2
installation, 2014
●When is america turned upside down??
●Collectivity
ASAM lit => minority lit
●Example and entryway toward understanding the larger question of american and
minority lit
●Asking the question about the
We
by asking question about the
I
Minority
●Concept of minority has been central to the founding of american life and governance
●Jefferson: All… will bear i n ind this sacred principle, that though the will of the
majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect and to violate twould
be oppression
●Metaphors:
○Notion of Racial and ethnic minorities
○Multilayered term
○At least 5 metaphors to describe the exp:
■1. Invisibility: the absence of recognition
●
Invisible Man
exp of feeling invisible, african american exp of 20s
○I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who
haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your
Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of
flesh and bone, fiber and liquids --and I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply
because people refuse to see me.
○Takes us on exp of this man he never names
■What if this exp is not just racial invisibility but a
larger existential invisibility we all feel??
■Specific => universal feeling
■unable to see the humanity in others
■2. Otherness: radical difference
●Asian as the always foreigner; the strange; the grotesque
○I am seen, but seen as so radical different that what is
centralized
■3. Assimilation:
●Strongest, most consistent in the country atm
●Immigrants => Americans
○Promise of leaving behind tradition and entering into
modern American life
■Language, cooking, morays
■To get the opp to come and becoming part of it
■Melting pot
○Limitations of this idea: may have worked for W Euros but
doesn’t work the same way for Asians
■Moment of asams that they can play another role
■4. Double consciousness
●W.E.B. DuBois,
The Souls of Black Folk
1903, ideas:
○AfAm to get PhD from Harvard
●the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color
line.
○Argument of civil rights
○Collectivity and struggle of notion of self as minority
●2018 culture
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
What it means to engage in notion of americans. Engaging from a place of being an ethnic minority. Ralph ellison: (cid:396)as i see it, the novel has always been bound up with the idea of nationhood. What is it that stopped us from attaining the ideal? (cid:397) Return to question of national collectivity: successes & failures. Reflection of what ideals (ex declaration of independence) Abstraction of an idea and a symbol. The events of vietnam, the importance of the context of the work. This one is diff than those of 30 years before. Asam lit => minority lit minority lit (cid:396)minority(cid:397) Example and entryway toward understanding the larger question of american and. Asking the question about the we by asking question about the i. Concept of (cid:396)minority(cid:397) has been central to the founding of american life and governance. At least 5 metaphors to describe the exp: Invisible man exp of feeling invisible, african american exp of 20s.
