Week 8 Blogs

In Race and Ethnicity, Kenneth Warren attempts to “make an account historically for race in the production of American literary and intellectual life without giving way to an anachronistic tendency to praise or blame historical figures for having anticipated or failed to realize current concerns” (257). The purpose of his text is to lead researchers to read and not condemn writers for the processes that they are a part of, but to try and understand how and why being subject to various contingencies and interrelations shapes their works. In order to get this point across, he gives an account of the last two decades of literary critique and then makes suggestions for looking at these works with a more (or less) critical eye. While he is clearly addressing an academic community, his language is not over-elevated or text-bookish. He reads smoothly like he is speaking to you personally.


Topoi- Past fact/future fact

“A topic of invention in which one refers back to general events in the past or to what we can safely suppose will occur in the future based on the record of the past.” There couldn’t be a more direct correlation between this topic of invention and Warren’s article, as he very specifically dares us to re-read our history with a more open mind in order to prevent that from happening. I really liked his reference to Claudia Tate’s proclamation on the institution of marriage, especially after our conversations last Thursday… perhaps Aristotle was more right than we educated folk like to admit with the whole past fact=future fact idea. The struggle that African Americans fought in order to obtain their civil rights is too often mirrored in the battles being fought by this generation’s “others.” Hopefully the when this history is read, it will be interpreted by the right mind before it is too late for the next generation’s “others.”


In her text, Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders, Susan Stanford Friedman outlines the scope and theory of this new field of literary study. She first gives an overview of the field and then offers concrete definitions and histories of migration, diasporas, and then borders in order to provide the reader with a substantial knowledge base. The purpose of her essay is to lay the foundation and provide a roadmap for further research in this field. This fact makes it apparent that she is addressing a scholarly community with hopes of sparking new interest and bringing new ideas to young minds that might continue to advance her field.


Topoi- Injustice

Well I was on a rampage about gay stuff...so I figured I’d roll with it. I was really moved by Stanford Frieman’s description of desire as a state of lack. I never really thought about it that way. When I think of the word desire, I think of “want,” not lack. She goes on to say that “home is often the perpetual object of desire, a longing that is never fulfilled in the ambiguity of existence caught between a consciousness of roots elsewhere and the realities of routes, of like shaped by movement through different locations that are never quite home.” When I read those words my heart bled for all of the people in my life (present company included) that have condemned themselves (and some by others) to an eternity of shuffling about in this state of soulful torment because they are longing for the acceptance and approval that they knew only as children (never as adults) and, ironically enough, probably never even existed to begin with. That is fucking injustice.