http://twp.duke.edu/twp-writing-studio/resources-students/genres
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/Baldwin-Sonnys-Blues.pdf
https://genius.com/Jay-z-spiritual-lyrics
Question 1
Please review creative writing as a genre. (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. Please explain if you believe the voice in Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues” is distinct from Jay Z’s “Spiritual.” To help you answer this question, please think of the following two passages below, on from “Sonny Blues” and the other from “Spiritual.” Does Baldwin’s voice as a writer come across differently from Jay Z’s? How? Why? Are they appealing to two distinct audiences?
The first is from “Sonny Blues” (the narrator is thinking about his mother and the suffering she has endured):
“I always see her wearing pale blue. She’d be sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it’s real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody’s talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father’s eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can’t see. For a minute they’ve forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody’s got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the lad’s head. Maybe there’s a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the comer. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop—will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won’t be sitting around the living room, talking about where they’ve come from, and what they’ve seen, and what’s happened to them and their kinfolk.”
The second are verses from “Spiritual”:
“Yeah, I am not poison, no I am not poison / Just a boy from the hood that / Got my hands in the air / In despair don’t shoot / I just wanna do good”
Question 2
Please read summary as a genre. (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. Once you have read it, please explain in your own words what is expected of a student writer preparing a summary as a genre.
Question 3
Please compare argument essay (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. as a genre to literature review (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. as a genre. Once you have read both descriptions, please list two features how an argument essay is different from a literature review?
Question 4
Please list three features that sets the film based on Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” a part from her story. That is, please indicate three ways the film differs from Gilman’s story.
Question 5
from Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues” (the narrator and his brother, Sonny, driving together in a cab as they travel back to Harlem, their childhood town):
So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn’t changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he hadn’t lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny’s face, it came to me that what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.
Passage #2 from Jay Z’s “Spiritual”:
“Sick of hiding in holes and behind hyperbole / This is real me unfold / Gangster in love, I’m thuggin’, I’m huggin’ / This is tougher than any gun that I raised / Any crack that I blazed, that was nothin’ / Peeling back the layers, uncovering / Scars that never healed, I never kept it this real”
Passage #3 from Costes’ “Between the World and Me” (talking to his son after learning about the verdict in Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri:
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
Passage #4 from Lee’s “The Bridge of Suffering”
The metaphor of the bridge provides an ideal base for an exploration of Baldwin’s continuing vision of “otherness,” that is of multiple alienation-religious, racial, familial and sexual; of community; and of the connecting links between them. The image conveys a number of his central concepts and devices. It speaks passage, and thus of his characters’ recurrent initiatory journeys, in space and time, from innocence to awareness. It refers to structure which counters chaos and specifically spans a void. This is a concept particularly significant for his artists who sing and play the blues, testifying to at least momentary triumph over loneliness and abandonment. Appropriately for the duality or ambivalence which informs Baldwin’s emotional and intellectual responses, and incidentally his style, the image conveys a bonding of opposites. Metaphorically the bridge suggests the union of artist and audience, races, brothers, and lovers.
Reflective Question (a minimum of 50 words)
How do all four passages speak to each other? That is, these four passages come from four separate texts, all of different genres, yet there is a powerful common theme on racism and suffering. Knowing this, how are these four texts speaking to each other about this theme? For example, do these four texts talk about resilience in the midst of pain, or the crushing devastation of pain? Do these four texts, speaking together, provide any insight on how you — whether you are a person of color or not — understand and handle injustices with no sight of compensation and fair treatment? Do you think these four texts explore the fundamental and existential dilemma of humanity: as flawed beings living within flawed institutions amongst cruelty, ignorance, and fear, how do we create a space for ourselves and our love ones that affirm our dignity and worth?