African American Literature

    Gwendolyn Brooks, The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith 1. Examine the way that Brooks, in The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith, discusses artifice (look up this word if you need!) and our role (as readers, as humans) in the “creation” of our own and other’s personal and cultural mythologies. Brooks, a writer herself, asks us to participate in the creation of her character, Satin-Legs Smith. But she also warns us against certain things in this process. Smith himself is all self-artifice, and yet his longings and needs are real, as are Brooks’ as the writer, and ours as readers. Through a close reading of the text, look at the ways that Satin-Legs Smith is “constructed,” or defies construction, and how the idea of a “construct” might relate to notions of cultural invention. This essay is all about close, critical examination of the words in the poem— take a look at the “Reading and Thinking About Poetry” handout for important tips. James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” 2. Baldwin’s autobiographical essay is a series of experiences in which the author not only seeks a more authentic self, but examines the self he currently has and its relationship to the world around him—to his father, his friends, the racist institutions he interacts with, and even death. In all of this, he seems to be stuck in an unreconcilable paradox—a choice between “amputation and gangrene,” as he says. For this essay, through a close reading of the text, you will examine the role of paradoxes in the essay. By this I don’t mean the obvious paradox of racist laws and regulations Baldwin runs up against, but the paradoxes of deciding between acceptance and rebellion, of love and hate, of the way people act vs. what’s in their best interest. How does the series of stories Baldwin tells in this essay illuminate and examine the various paradoxes that come bubbling to the surface upon his father’s death?