Reading Response: Letters

We've now read several different pieces of epistolary literature (written in letter form), so for this response, I'd like for you to choose one of the final letters in The Fire This Time, "Message to My Daughters" or "This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution" and write your own letter in response. You can address the author, or someone you know, or me, or us as a class, and respond to the ideas in the letter you choose.  This response is due on May 9 by the end of the day (11:59 pm).

Reading Response: Open Poetry Explication

For this response, choose one poem, and dig deeply into it to explore what you think it's trying to get us to see or feel. Any poem from Of Poetry and Protest is an option, except for those that have been options for reading responses before. You can write about any poem in the collection except for the Emmett Till poems and the poems about Civil Rights (the ones about Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer). You are also welcome to read other poems by the poets you've encountered; the Poetry Foundation website is searchable by author if you'd like to look for one poet's work, or they also put together a list of poems for Black History Month by some of the authors we've read. Any of those are fair game as well.

If you have questions about whether or not you can write about a poem, let me know, but the point here is for you to offer your original ideas about how to interpret a poem that has spoken to you in some way. Make sure you identify the poem with title and author. This response is due on May 9, but the end of the day is fine (11:59 pm).

Reading Response: 13th

As you watch the documentary, I'd like for you to think about how this form of storytelling compares with other texts we've read. Do you find the film more or less compelling than poetry ("Cells and Windows," for instance) or memoir (ex: Between the World and Me) or fiction (ex: Homegoing)? Why do you think that is? How does documentary function differently as a genre than other forms of representation? Make sure to refer to particular strategies or elements from the film to make your points. This response is due no later than May 9 (but the end of the day is fine).

Between the World and Me

For the response to Ta-Nahesi Coates's book, Between the World and Me, you can respond to anything that you find interesting, as long as you focus on one idea. Here are some possibilities: you could consider how he defines race and racism, the contrast he sees between his son's life and his own, audience (his son and...?), the allusion to what he calls "the Dream," or the significance of the title (what is between the world and him? How is he defining "world"?)  You are also free to choose other themes or recurring ideas in the text. The response is due on Tuesday, May 2, at 9:45 am.

Reading Response: Connections to the Past

The readings for Tuesday, 4/25, are making explicit (and sometimes not-so-explicit) connections between our contemporary context, and the history of racism and the movement for black freedom from other eras. Choose one of the texts and show how it invites us to think about that movement as continuous and not isolated, how it invites us to see our current context as connected to and a product of our past. Responses are due by 9:45 am, Tuesday, April 25.

Reading Response: Recitatif

For Thursday's reading response, you can choose one of the poems or the short story to focus on: "The Enactment"; "Fannie (of Fannie Lou Hamer)"; "Red Velvet," or the short story, "Recitatif." If you choose one of the poems, think about what we discussed in class on Tuesday and find a "foothold," or element to focus on to help you draw out possible meanings in the poem. If you choose to respond to "Recitatif," you might think about the role of memory or about the purpose of the character of Maggie in the story (lots of other possibilities, too, but we will be discussing memory and Maggie in class if you're looking for an angle.)

Responses are due by 9:45, Thursday, April 20.

Reading Response: James Baldwin and Emmett Till

For Tuesday's reading response, you can choose to focus on the essays or on two of the poems. Think about how the works are in dialogue with one another. How are they responding to a similar idea or using a similar strategy to convey their point? Where do they diverge or rely on contrasting strategies? What do you learn by reading them together? This response is due by class time on Tuesday, April 18.

Homegoing: Open Reading Response

There is so much to write about in Homegoing that I'd like to leave it up to you what you want to focus on in your response. The parameters are that you need to choose a focused idea and illustrate it with particular passages from the text, but beyond that, it's up to you. I'd love to hear about what interests you most about the novel.

Reading Response: Things Fall Apart

One of the central questions of the novel related to how we think about cultural conflict. What happens when two cultures' values come into conflict? What do we learn about the dangers of assuming one culture's superiority over another? What do we learn about a culture's inability to adapt or change? Use one episode from the novel, explore what Achebe wants us to see about the interplay between two vastly different cultural groups. This response is due by class time on Thursday, March 30.

Reading Response #6: Maus

Some critics have argued that all history does not have a lesson to teach us. Writing about the Holocaust, Jonathan Rosen asks, "Why should we assume there are positive lessons to be learned from [the Holocaust]? What if some history does not have anything to teach us? What if it does not make us better? What if, walking through the haunted halls of the Holocaust Museum, looking at evidence of the destruction of European Jewry, visitors do not emerge with a greater belief that all men are equal but with a belief that man by nature is evil?" For this reading response, I'd like you to use Art Spiegelman's Maus to attempt to answer these questions. How does Maus provide an answer to Rosen's accusations? Do we learn something from this representation of the Holocaust; if so, what? As always, make sure to use particular evidence from the text to prove a focused point. Reading responses to Maus are due by class time on Thursday, March 23.

"Reading" Response: Life Is Beautiful (last opportunity before Midterm)

In Roberto Benigni's 1998 film, Life Is Beautiful, we encounter a strategy for telling the story of the Holocaust that may seem unlikely, or even offensive: comedy. In your response, I'd like for you to explain how the film works to elicit a response from the viewer. Why laughter? What is the significance of the comedic overtones of the film? As you would use particular passages from a novel or story, you will use scenes as your evidence to argue for the most convincing interpretation of the film's reliance on comedy. You will want to think about the overall message, or the most important theme, that the film is grappling with, and how comedy serves the purpose of that message/theme. This response is due no later than Thursday, March 9, at the end of the day (11:59 pm), and it counts towards your total reading responses before Midterm (you must have two).

Reading Response #4: Atomic Bomb Literature

Compared with the Holocaust, little has been written about the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb. For this reading response, I want you to choose either one of the poems or the short story and pick out the literary devices that the author chooses to express what many have described as inexpressible horror. What does the writer choose to focus on, or draw the reader's attention to? What literary strategies does he or she use to make an impression of the consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This response is due by class time on Tuesday, February 28.

Reading Response #3: When the Emperor Was Divine

Critics have said of Julie Otsuka's novel that it is "spare" and "minimal," which means that she packs a lot of meaning into what might at first seem a simple story. For your response to the novel, I want you to choose one (or a couple of related) passages to read closely, unearthing the meaning that might not be obvious. Make an argument about how the passage you choose illuminates an important theme of the novel. Here are some possibilities:

• American identity
• Patriotism and loyalty
• Alien-ness
• The portrayal of enemies
• Community and belonging
• Varying meanings of home
• Secrecy

You are not limited to this list: feel free to identify another theme that seems important in the novel.

This response is due no later than class time on Tuesday, February 21. You will only have two more opportunities to write a Reading Response before Spring Break, so make sure you get at least two in before then.

Reading Response #2: The Hiding Place

One of the rights listed in the UDHR is the "freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom...to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.of religious expression." Corrie Ten Boom's memoir, The Hiding Place, offers us one family's experience of how their religious faith both propelled them into suffering and sustained them through it.

For this reading response, I want you to think about what The Hiding Place teaches us about faith in suffering. Choose two moments from the book and demonstrate how Corrie Ten Boom's experience provides an illustration of the value and role of faith during intense hardship. Make sure to make connections between the two instances you choose: do we see her faith develop over the course of the novel? How so? How does her faith operate differently under different circumstances? What do we learn about the faith of the characters in each instance, but also, what do we learn about God's faithfulness?

This response is due by the end of the day on Tuesday, Feb. 14 (I will say a few things in class about how to write these responses, so I'd encourage you to draft a response and then come to class and see how you might revise.)

Reading Response #1: The Book Thief

Set during Nazi occupation in Germany, The Book Thief offers us a chance to see how the regime of Hitler affected everyday German citizens like the Hubermanns, the Steins, and Liesel Meminger. The campaign to exterminate the Jewish people is an obvious and egregious violation of human rights, and we will get to that. For this response, however, I'd like you to articulate how the story of Liesel offers us a picture of how the rights of German citizens also are violated by Nazi rule. You might choose a specific right to focus on and trace it in a few passages in the novel. You might focus on a couple of pivotal moments, or on a key character, in the novel and show what we learn about rights in those instances. Remember that your response should be focused on one, specific main idea, and that you should be using evidence from specific passages in the novel to show how that idea fleshes itself out. (See the Response guidelines for more information). Make sure that you finish reading before you write, so that you can take the whole arc of the novel into account (you need to know how it ends to make a convincing argument, in other words). Responses are due, posted as a comment on this post, no later than Thursday, Feb. 2, at the beginning of class.