Crafting Creative Concepts with Charlotte

So far in this course, we've established that there's a fine line between history and fiction. The historian has the liberty to include or exclude specific details in their account of events in order to frame things in a certain way. I found Doctorow's Ragtime to be a perfect example of this phenomenon.  Though Doctorow isn't a historian, he poses as one throughout Ragtime as he weaves together history and fiction into a tightly meshed story. With the historical figures that he ropes into his story, he chooses to mention certain events and specific parts of their lives while ignoring other, less desirable details. For example, Evelyn Nesbit had a child while Harry K. Thaw was in an insane asylum (due to his murder of Stanford White). She claimed it was Thaw's child and had been conceived during one of her visits, but he denied paternity. This is some wild stuff! But because Doctorow tries to separate Evelyn from the gossip and scandals that surrounded her, he lef...

Beloved and White Boy Shuffle  are really different books in a number of ways. They're set more than 100 years removed from each other, and it's hard to draw many similarities between the main characters of each, Sethe and Gunnar. Sethe is an outcast - Gunnar, a celebrity. Sethe lives in rural Ohio - Gunnar lives in LA. I could go on and on. However, at the end of White Boy Shuffle  there was a scene that I felt connected Sethe and Gunnar very closely. Gunnar and Yoshiko have their first child towards the end of White Boy Shuffle , Naomi. She's about two years old at the end of the book, and we last see the Kaufmans awaiting a nuclear attack from the government. The fate of Naomi seemed very similar to me to the fate of Beloved: both killed by their parents (though Naomi a bit less directly) as toddlers to escape a life of oppression. But they don't get a chance at life because of this, and you have to wonder if it's even the right of Gunnar and Sethe to take the ...

Paul D and Sethe have an extremely complicated relationship that constantly morphs and shifts throughout  Beloved . They spent lots of time at Sweet Home together, and therefore have an established emotional bond. Though a more physical aspect of their relationship develops, the glue holding them together is their shared trauma of living at Sweet Home and of their respective escapes. Generally speaking, relationships held together primarily by shared traumatic experiences are fragile and unstable: Paul D and Sethe's relationship is no exception. Though they understand each other's experiences with slavery, they have little else in common. Crucially, they haven't seen each other in eighteen years, and there are significant gaps in their knowledge what has happened in the other's life in the nearly two decades since their last encounter. Most importantly, Paul D is unaware of what Sethe did in the shed on that fateful day when schoolmaster came to 124. With the presen...

For the most part, I think that we can all agree that  Their Eyes Were Watching God  is an extremely progressive novel that explores female independence in the early 1900s. However, Janie is abused in each of her 3 relationships. Hurston really plays each of these instances down, which raises some questions about the characters and society in the early 1900s. Janie's first abusive encounter is with Logan Killucks, right before she runs away with Joe. "'Ah'll take holt uh dat ax and come in dere and kill yuh!'", exclaims Logan when Janie is unwilling to help him shovel manure (Hurston 30). It's a really short phrase, and you could miss it if you're not reading carefully. However, Logan's off-handed comment really shakes Janie up, and this is the final straw - that same day, she runs off with Joe towards a new life. Janie is abused emotionally by Joe, and it has a long-term impact on her view of herself and her role in society. Joe's abusive ...

I think we can all agree that Janie hasn't had the best of luck when it comes to husbands. First she is forced into her marriage with Logan Killucks, and then she runs away with Joe, who seems to be a Prince Charming but really just wants to use her. As a reader, I started out pretty optimistic about Janie's life, but by the time she meets Tea Cake I was feeling more cynical. She's had two failed relationships that started out somewhat positively: what's to say this one won't end like the others? Janie's first failed marriage can be blamed primarily on Grandma, as she is the one who forced Janie into the relationship in the first place. Janie was too young and immature to marry, and didn't even like Logan to begin with. That is not a good foundation for a long and happy marriage. Though Logan is painted as villainous in their relationship, he doesn't really do anything wrong. He expects out of Janie what a man would generally expect out of a wife in th...

The Brotherhood in  Invisible Man  is a very strange organization. The leaders are hypocritical, corrupt, and blindsided by their beliefs, which is made increasingly obvious to the narrator and the reader throughout the book. The Committee is made up of ideologues, who, if you remember from Mr. Butler's class, are historically extremely disconnected from the realities of society. Clifton's death really brings this key flaw into the narrator's mental spotlight, and this creates more distance and tensions between the narrator and the committee. The narrator really starts to realize the flaws in the Brotherhood's overarching generalizations after Clifton is shot. Because the narrator saw Clifton's death as very individual, he starts to see Harlem as a collection of individuals instead of a generalized mass. He really sees the men in the zoot suits for the first time, even though he has seen people like them many times before. He notes that the Brotherhood overlook...