12AP Literature & Composition

Fall 2018-19

Choose one of the following twelve prompts as your final response to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The essay will be due on Friday, December 14^th. Your essay should result in a 4-6-page paper utilizing textual evidence in line with proper MLA format. Please do not submit a paper that results in simple summary, circular reasoning, or diluting redundancy. Your task is to make some critical argument via textual evidence and sophisticated reasoning.

6 Tips (Conventions):

• Avoid plot summary. A paper that recounts what happened in a novel—or that analyzes selected scenes in the same order they occur in the novel—is letting the novel’s author rather than the paper’s author structure the paper’s argument. Sometimes papers fall into plot summary because a student imagines that he or she is writing
for a reader unfamiliar with the novel. But if you imagine that you are writing for someone who has read the novel at least once, then you don’t need to rehearse the plot for your reader. Instead, you can focus on selected scenes, briefly identifying them before analyzing significant details. Resist shadowing the novel’s chronology in your own paper. 

• Use block quotations appropriately. When quoting longer stretches of prose (more than four lines in your paper), set it off from the body of the paper in an indented block quotation. Block quotations are a great opportunity to do some extended close reading. When you use a block quotation, make sure that it is rich enough to reward extended analysis (which should be at least as long as the quotation itself). A well-chosen block quotation will not only corroborate a claim that you have already argued, but will also offer a new, related emphasis or implication for your argument to pursue. In this way, block quotations can help your argument to maintain momentum, averting the stagnant paper structure in which a thesis is followed by a list of illustrative examples.

• Avoid basing your argument on opinion. Sometimes a work of literature provokes personal feelings and opinions in a reader. When this happens, the reader should try to suspend those personal feelings and opinions as he or she closely reads, paying attention instead to structures and features in the text. Textual evidence and not personal conviction should be the basis of your thesis and argument.

• Focus on speakers, not authors: Because English papers make claims about texts rather than about authors, narratives have a “narrator” who should not be confused with the author.

• Write in the present tense. Because English papers approach literary works as linguistic artifacts rather than as historical documents, they discuss characters and events in the present tense rather than the past tense. However, use the past tense if highlighting something in the novel that happened in the past. 

• Use MLA style citations. Because English papers quote frequently, often from the same text, they cite page numbers parenthetically. 

Essay Choices:

1. So much of this novel is rooted in the unfortunate truth that slavery dehumanizes individuals by stripping them of their identity, destroying their ability to conceive of the self. Morrison combines the psychological and cultural aspects of the black community and explores the issues of identity, family, and self-possession in a world where slavery has apparently become an unfortunate issue of the past, but emerges, throughout, as a haunting presence. Consider how characters in the novel contend with the past, either personal or societal. Then, write an essay in which you show how the relationship to the past contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
2. How does motherhood get displayed in this novel?
3. How does love get measured and defined in this novel?
4. Discuss the different roles of the community in betraying and protecting the house at 124. What larger issue might Morrison be suggesting here about community?
5. In what ways can this novel be read as history? Should you choose to answer this essay question, make sure to write a literary analysis paper—not a history paper.  
6. “This is not a story to pass on” (275). Discuss how this warning by the narrator at the end illuminates the novel as a whole.
7. Consider the elements and effects of the novel’s structure. You might want to consider oral tradition; flashbacks & time shifts; magical realism; stream of consciousness; and the novel as a bildungsroman.
8. The epigraph to Beloved is from the Bible, Romans 9:25: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her Beloved, which was not Beloved.” Taken by itself, this might seem to favor doubt about, for instance, the extent to which Beloved was really loved, or the extent to which Sethe herself was rejected by her own community. But there is more to it than that. The passage is from a chapter in which the Apostle Paul ponders, Job-like, the ways of God toward humanity, in particular the evils and inequities visible everywhere on the earth. Paul goes on to talk about the fact that the Gentiles, hitherto despised and outcast, have now been redefined as acceptable. The passage proclaims, not rejection, but reconciliation and hope. It continues: “And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.” Toni Morrison is too smart, and too much of a writer, not to have intended this context. Here, if anywhere, is her own comment on the goings-on in her novel, her final response to the measuring and dividing and excluding “schoolteachers” of this world. In what ways can this novel be analyzed through a biblical lens?
9. Although you answered this question prior to completing the novel, feel free to answer it again, this time with more fullness and sophistication: “Who or what is Beloved?” (Don’t make this question your title, however.)
10. In Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel, Sethe endures the oppression of a self- imposed prison of memory by revising the past. Discuss how Morrison uses memory and rememory in this novel.   
11. Discuss the parallels between Beloved and Greek tragedy.
12. Write a critical essay based on your own close reading. However, please make sure to confirm your argumentative aim with me.

Please note that you will have the entire week to work on the essay in class. Thus, please take advantage of consulting with me to insure a strong paper.