Jazz Tonni Morrison and African American Beauty Culture
Topic: Choose a theme (the statement that a text makes about the subject of women) and lend support to an argument that relates theme to form (structure) and type (genre).
This topic will make little sense to you before the end of the fourth week. Class lectures, however, will model examples. By April 12 you will be expected to turn in a statement of purpose about the work you will be analyzing and a detailed abstract of your ideas, indicating the questions that you intend to answer in your essay.
You should conduct research on the author, the culture she is writing from, the central cultural/historical events the work alludes to (for example, slavery, the Middle Passage, the U.S. Occupation of and Earthquake in Haiti, the Spanish American War, the Cuban Revolution, Bay of Pigs, the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to the North, the independence of Nigeria, and countless others).
You should always consider the moment in time a work is set in, its intended audience, and the translations the work may have undergone to fit the demands of an increasingly global market.
