1. Warming up on the whiteboards: Baby Suggs and Beloved as foils
2. Enjoying an abbreviated Socratic on Beloved, Chapters 13-15
3. Wrapping up with questions, epiphanies, and kudos
4. Performing a close reading on the initial epigraph, the first inch, and the last inch of the roughest chapter in the book: Chapter 16 and predicting what this chapter is about
Note: The incident in this chapter (as well as much of this novel) is based on the true and tragic story of Margaret Garner. Click HERE to read about her.
HW:
1. For next Monday (Nov 27): [ADJUSTMENT] Please read through the end of Part I (Chapters 16, 17, and 18) and complete your Socratic ticket. Chapter 16 is ROUGH. See Foster's chapter on violence if you need help.
2. For next Tuesday (Nov 28): Bring in a hard (or electronic) copy of the poem you've chosen for your paper/project. You will write your metacognitive in class this day.
3. For next Wednesday (Nov 29): [ADJUSTMENT] Please read the first half of Chapter 1 in Part 2 of Beloved. No reading ticket necessary.
Heads-up! December 6-7: Poetry papers and project are due.
Katie: Why do they keep calling Baby Suggs holy?
ReplyDeleteGriffin: Baby Suggs did something biblical with turkeys. Everyone wondered why she is so gifted. They were more angry with her for the good she was doing vs. when Jesus did and everyone was so happy and dancing. Why the parallel situation?
Jake: Trying to show the reality of human nature. In reality people experience jealousy and a former slave shouldn’t have the ability to guide all these other people.
Griffin: The jealousy happened with Jesus too. People didn’t like that he was having followers. People say that Baby Suggs wasn’t worthy.
Lindsey: Seems like a last supper situation. They are standing in a garden - corn is ripening, squash is plentiful. But Suggs feels like something bad is coming. When they are finding the blackberries with the wasps and hornet - made him seem like a Christ like image.
Griffin: Why two characters Christ-like?
Lindsey: Just the idea of having a biblical comparison.
Bella: Goes through the hardship to get the blackberries just like slaves go through times of pain just to reach freedom.
Anna: People didn’t want to accept Suggs big feast because they felt like they didn’t deserve it.
Bella: They felt dependent in a way by allowing them to be served so much. Almost don’t want the charity because they feel like their freedom is threatened.
Griffin: Will people continue to reject the free love?
Anna: Everyone is searching for freedom right now, but maybe later in the book they will band together and the rejection will diminish.
Lindsey: Everyone won't come to the house because of the baby ghost. Later they seem to be abandoned.
Bella: Is the dark thing coming the baby ghost?
Henry: I predicted that it was Howard and Buglar leaving the house because of “they.” Something earlier said Baby Suggs made Buglar and Howard leave.
Jessie: Baby and Beloved both have a strange sense of things coming. ‘
ReplyDeleteAnna: She is seeing high top shoes that she didn’t like the look of. When we first meet Beloved she is wearing those new shoes.
Griffin: PAul D asks a question about what if Beloved is not even a real girl but he makes no decision off of that. It is only in the characters thoughts and then it disappears. They never choose.
Katie: Stream of consciousness writing. They have initial thoughts but then they disregard them.
Griffin: All the characters seem irrational. What is Morrison trying to say by that? No one does things based on thoughtful approaches. Why does she make her characters so spontaneous if they are constantly thinking. She is intentionally doing something where she makes her characters think but no one does anything about it.
Lindsey: The characters expect bad things to happen which makes them accept it. Even if they realize a bad presence they just think that’s how things are not that they should do something aobut it.
Anna: The rational characters seem to be the only ones to leave 124. The irrational characters live inside the house.
Noah: The past seems much brighter and the present is winter and darker. Something obviously happened in the middle. There must have been a loss of Christ that takes away all the color. It seems apocalyptic.
Lindsey: The baby’s blood is the bad thing. There is only 28 days of unslaved life which means that there is slaved life after that.
Bella: How much does Sethe know vs. how much she acknowledges? It is hard to believe that Sethe hasn’t. Denver even has put some things together. A lot of characters potentially deny signs.
Griffin: Disremember is not a word but remember is. Disremember is actively forgetting a memory. Morrison intentionally made up this work to show that Sethe is changing the rules to fit Beloved.
Jake: You can actively repress experiences of events, but events that traumatic and horrible are going to be burned in their memory. Sethe is making excuses more than actually trying to get something done.
Brennen: When Paul D asks her to have a baby, what does that mean? Maybe he wanted to start a new life.
Kensy: The fact that he is asking her for another baby falls under that. Beloved is enslaving them. He thinks she is the reason they are not working.
ReplyDeleteRyan: You think correctly if you are repressing something because it’s almost like it’s not even you thinking.
Andrea: They call Paul D the last of the Sweet Home men. Implied that the other four slave men also believed that he would be the “last one.”
Bella: The white stairs keep coming up and they go up to where Sethe sleeps. Paul D thinks about them a lot. Maybe he thinks she’s above.
Drew: Thinking about the snow. The weather was brought up and each character had different characteristics at that moment.
Leclaire: Being through a traumatic event, it's interesting to see how your brain copes with that. There is a tug-of-war between not trying to disremember but also not letting it take over.
Chapter 16
Jake: This is now from a different heartless perspective.