Area 1: Self as a Reader

Reflect on the development of your perspective as a reader. A place to start would be the excerpt about “inversions” and the “double consciousness” discussed by Gina Apostol in “Francine Prose’s Problem”

This doubling makes any reading of a white-dominant text by a person of color quite fascination, and in my view almost infinetely richer — becuase how often, as a reader of a culture not my own, do I transpose and reflexively imagine my own island world of a much-colonizd town, Tacloban, in Leyte, Philippines, with, say Jo March’s snowy and quiet untropical Concord in Little Women or Elizabeth Bennet’s trim-hdgerow and not-so-onclusive Hertfordshire in Pride and Prejudice, to name just two indelible texts I have “authored,” my own? My sense is that Concord, Hertfordshire, and Tacloban all gain from such intertextual couplings.

What kinds of “intertextual coupings” did you bring to our readings this semester?

 

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Area 2: Writing Situations

In “My Life’s Sentences,” Jhumpa Lahiri writes “The best sentences orient us, like stars in he sky, like landmarks on a trail.” Find and reflect on 3-5 sentences from non-graded writing, and orient a stranger to the “trail” they mark. What kind of story do these sentences tell?

 

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Area 3: Language and Identity

 

In “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What is?” James Baldwin wrote that language is “a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: It reveals the private identity, and connects on with, or divorces one from, the larger, pubic or ommunal identity” (781). Consider this statement in context of the reading and writing you have done this semester. How, if at all, has your reading and writing this semester served to unlock, reveal, connect, or divorce you from the greater world?

 

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