Welcome
Welcome back. We’re going to start with a free writing exercise, using a strange and unsettling sentence from Morrison’s beloved. Here is the sentence:
This is not a story to pass on.
I’ll ask you to write in response to this for 5 minutes. As the sentence itself suggests, I won’t ask you to pass this story on, or to share it.
Introduction
Today’s session will be relatively straightforward. We’re going to talk about chapter 5 of Toni Morrison’s book, Narrating the Other
In this chapter, Morrison talks about her book Beloved, and she also talks about the origins of the book in a real-historical event, narrated by a minister called Reverend P. S. Bassett.
Shared Reading
So we’ll start by sharing the reading of Bassett’s account. It’s incredibly harrowing.
Discussion
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First, talk through the events in the story to get clear about what the text is saying, and what happened.
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What are your first impressions of this passage?
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What does it tell you about slavery in mid-19th Century America?
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Who are the characters you most respond to, and why?
Feedback
We’ll talk about this in the large group!
This is the story that Morrison used as a starting point for her book Beloved. In this session, we’re going to try some more literary experiments of our own. Let’s look at the end of the chapter:
Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.
Writing exercise
What we’re going to do now is to explore this idea, by going back to the passage, and choosing a character to become. Who are the characters that intrigue you or interest you? Who do you find compelling? When you have chosen a character, what I want you to do is write a monologue in the first person, exploring this scene from the point of view of this character.
You have 20–25 minutes!
Sharing
If there’s time, you can share your work.
Homework
For our homework, we’re going to read the first section of Stuart Hall’s essay, Race, the Floating Signifier: What More is There to Say about Race? You can find the essay here, in chapter 19:
https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/2397448/368
For your homework, I want you to read to the end of the section called “But What about the Reality of Racial Discrimination and Violence?” Read up to the sentence, “A signifier, a discourse, yes, that is my argument”, which you can find on page 363.
Post a summary on the discussion board, and one question. We’ll watch the lecture in the class next time, but this is also an exercise in re-reading. So it’s good to have read through the text before watching it. We’ll then discuss the first half of Hall’s essay in the next class, and then the second half the time after that!