Nonfiction Notes Flashcards
Ending of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
“Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage”
Stepto on SOULS
–generic narrative text
–radical revision of the basis essays into chapters and a coherent whole and a stronger “hero-narrator” voice
–scholarly rather than white authorities for his authenticating documents
–cultural immersion ritual at the center of text (looking for it in the Black Belt but retreated to the elitist Atlanta study)
–trying to capture race-spirit
–spatial communitas
–Atlanta study
Stepto on UP FROM SLAVERY
–authenticating narrative
–dominate the past by recontextualizing it in the present (giving definitions of what the slave quarters are)
–public appeal for his institution
–self-authentication through Tusk/uplift myth, a historical event
–“I think” (less dominant stance, allowing the white readers more authority than he claims)
Black Belt
How the Other Half Lives as social expose
–Late 19th century urban fiction/social science discourse complicit with emerging modes of social discipline
–the desire to represent the lives of socially subordinate populations converged with governmental and private-sector reform and social service programs to establish an extensive web of surveillance through which the poor and disenfranchised were analyzed, regulated, and policed
–Introduces potentially disturbing scenes, but through hetorical framing, protecting the reader’s position of specular distance and security
–The poor constitute a spectacle that Riis’s viewers observe, inspect, and scrutinize from a distance; access to the deepest recesses of the tenements through a rhetoric that confirms social separation
MAN LOOKING AT CARRIAGES ENVISIONING REVENGE:
Unsettling for readers:
- -shifting the narrative perspective from the carriage to the sidewalk,
- -sentimental subjectivity (hearth and home), –threat of violence
However, threat mitigated by readers’ privileged narrative position:
- -violence is disturbing, but from readers’ vantage point it is comprehensible, even predictable
- -the ragged man’s thoughts are transparent to us, legible
- -we know the solution
Modernity in SOULS
–“Of the Meaning of Progress”: how the isolated community in the TN mountains changes
“My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly […] As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet– (stories of the changes the people went through” (56)
- -“Of the Wings of Atalanta”: “peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future” (59)
- -Threat of focusing too much on $$ against the Universities
- -“the smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the might city and covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle above Stone Hall” (67)
Social equality in SOULS
Social Equality
Talking/traveling with the reader (often implied to be white), referring often to what “we” must remember
“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls” (82 “Of the Training of Black Men 82)
The allegorical story of the two Johns in “Of the Coming of John”
“It was not and is not money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red blood” (“Of the Training of Black Men” 76)
Location in SOULS
–Evokes a powerful sense of specific locales, individual and communal homes, and the natural world, often through a narrative of roads/travel/sightseeing with an autobiographical tendency
–“Of the Meaning of Progress” starts with “Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begin to roll and crumple to greet the Alleghanies” (49), and describes in detail the houses, schoolroom, people, farms he came to know there, ending the essay with “Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow Car” (58).
–“Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece” takes the reader (“you,” implied white reader at times) on a tour of Georgia’s Black Belt that feels autobiographical at times
Opens with the question: “Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest” (100)
“We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows…” (113)
–“Of the Coming of John” starts with: “Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until it stops against a wide green lawn” (165);
–Gives local politics/education, effect of moving to/from the North
But always draws connections to international contexts & implications & imperialism
–Most famously in “The Dawn of Freedom” opening: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,–the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (16)
–“Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece”: “this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead” (110)
–Alexander Crummel was “born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the echoes of Manila and El Caney” (157)
Women in the 19th Century Main Argument
–plea for the removal of social barriers inhibiting the full development of woman’s nature
–redefinition of “female” and “male”
–recognition of feminine and masculine principles with boundaries fluid enough to promote the cultivation of self that incorporated them both
“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens into solid, solid rushes into fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman”
Form & Style: Women in the 19th Century
–Range of allusive and intertextual events
–Energy of quotation, the urgency of manifold forms of cultural reference, and the unstoppable cataloging of ‘signs of the times’ produce a ‘stream which is ever flowing from the heights of my thoughts’ (Fuller describes).
– in a moment of understandable fatigue, not a flood, but somewhat depressing prospect of an urban crowd, a ‘crowd of books.’ The less exhilarating descent from myth to book review (“not reading, but sighing over”)
–Quantity signifies both politically and authorially. She chooses her anecdotes from a crowd of instances and calls attention to the feeling of pressure behind and within her allusions, arguing as one for whom the sublime of multiplying references is proof of her sincerity
Repetitive, accumulating, associative style constructed similar to Emerson’s
–Merges autobiography with essay
–Persistent reference to her emotional imperatives as both reader and writer–in addition to the allusive redundancy such emotion generates–gives the text its tone of urgency
“Such instances count up by scores within my own memory”
“yet I have spoken, for the subject makes me feel too much”
“for he is a writer who pleases me well”
Women in the 19th Century as a Transcendental Text
Uses a central intellectual commitment of the –transcendental movement, the belief in the possibility of ‘self-culture’, or the continual spiritual growth of the soul, to diagnose, and prescribe a remedy for, the condition of women (Robinson 245)
“It is not woman, but the law of right, the law of growth, that speak in us, and demands the perfection of each being in its kind, apple as apple, woman as woman…What concerns me now is, that my life be beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life in its kind”
–Bridge between romantic philosophy and social reform
according to the transcendentalists, character needed development not for its own sake but for the sake of a divine core of identity within the individual that transcended the self, exemplified in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (247)
–Poet-hero & intuition
“The especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. She excels not so easily in classification, or re-creation, as in an instinctive seizure of causes, and a simple breathing out of what she receives that has the singleness of life, rather than the selecting and energizing of art”
