Essay Instructions: This order is for mpellat.
Instructions from Instructor: Class, your paper must discuss a poet or poets from this course; and you must use, at a minimum, four poems from each poet in order to complete a thorough analysis. In addition, the poems you use should at least include two poems not discussed by you in this class. Your final paper must also be between 10-15 pages in length and contain a proper MLA formatted Works Cited page, which is not a part of your required 10-15 pages. Please include a title page and brief synopsis.
My comments to the writer (mpellat): Below is the proposal, the research gathered on it and instructor comments. Please write an 8 page paper on Amiri Baraka based on the following proposal. I’ve attached a web page where you can read many of his works. Two other poems besides “Leroy” and “Fresh Zombies” must be analyzed. I also included a works cited below that web page. You do not have to use all of the sources in the works cited. You can locate your own sources or use mine. At least four works must be analyzed. If you need them, send me a note and I will gather them and upload them to the resource file. All the other files, sample papers will be upload to the file including the ugly, messed up paper. I'll also include the other paper you wrote on Amiri Baraka? Please include the free works cited in MLA style. Thank you.
INSTRUCTOR COMMENTS:
hi, mon 3.15pm est usa 5.17.10
Excellent proposal for a paper, and it could later serve u well as a thesis. Also, be sure u use the evidence from the poems to illustrate your points, not from social or historical matters, but how they fit into them. Go from the works to the comments and where things fit in the schema of is work and time. More analysis of Baraka's work is needed. Be sure and clearly state your thesis, what you're proving in this article.
ESSAY TOPIC
This essay will locate the literary works and interpretations of Amiri Baraka in the trajectory and changes of his personal biography as well as in the broader schema of the American and English literary traditions. His works, his biography, and the historical currents of the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath, as well as the current of literary genre were all (and arguably still are) in constant dialogue with each other through complex patterns of influence. The thesis proposed herein will make explicit some of these complex connections through a use of diverse sources and types of information related to Baraka and the period of his work.
THESIS STATEMENT
The thesis proposed herein will specifically deconstruct concepts of race and identity in the literary works of Amiri Baraka. These are to be seen as highly subjective, transformative, and ever-changing concepts, and as such bear a strong relationship to the specific contexts of their use and conceptualization. Baraka's impact on the Civil Rights Movement and the African American-as well as the purely American and even the universal-literary canon is difficult to overstate; his play, poems, and essays have proven not only formative for Baraka's own generations, but for several subsequent generations of young minds, as well. Baraka's own assessment of his life, the historical circumstances that can objectively be applied to his biography, and his other works will all be examined to illuminate the meaning(s) of race and identity-and the ultimate lack of meaning attached to these concepts in any real sense-as it appears in the works of Baraka.
CONTEXT
Baraka and his contemporaries show distinctly modernist trends in their works, which are also distinctly colored by the Civil Rights Movement era through which they lived and in which many-including Baraka himself-began their literary and intellectual careers. Baraka's own upbringing as the son of relatively well-off African American parents, his experiences in higher education and in the military, and the details of his later life and relationships all had profound effects on his writing and his concepts of selfhood as an African American male. In a very direct manner, this thesis will be focused on exploring the context of Baraka's work in order to more clearly understand his theories on race and identity, making further discussion of this context here rather redundant and premature.
METHOD
A wide array of works by Baraka, including poetry, plays, and essays, as well as the works of many of his contemporaries and biographies, interviews, and other sources regarding Baraka himself will be consulted in the development and construction of the proposed thesis. Historical analysis will also be conducted via primary and secondary sources, providing general background information on the different eras of Baraka's ongoing life and work. In this manner a comprehensive understanding of his views and concepts can be acquired.
INSTRUCTOR COMMENTS:
hi, mon 3.15pm est usa 5.17.10
Excellent proposal for a paper, and it could later serve u well as a thesis. Also, be sure u use the evidence from the poems to illustrate your points, not from social or historical matters, but how they fit into them. Go from the works to the comments and where things fit in the schema of is work and time. More analysis of Baraka's work is needed. Be sure and clearly state your thesis, what you're proving in this article.
Amiri Baraka:
http://www.amiribaraka.com/
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/poetry/baraka_jones.html#abara1
Fresh Zombies
OK Shuffles. Stink in neon
Lie in lights. Betray before millions
Assassinate w/ slogans. Not old toms
but New Toms, Double Toms
A Tom Tom Macoute. Fresh Zombies.
House Nigger maniacs. Oreo serial killers
That thumping, that horrible sound,
is not music, not drums, but shuffling
Not old toms, New Toms, Double Toms
A Tom Tom Macoute. Fresh Zombies.
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/poetry/baraka_jones.html#abara1
Leroy
I wanted to know my mother when she sat
looking sad across the campus in the late 20's
into the future of the soul, there were black angels
straining above her head, carrying life from our ancesters,
and knowledge, and the strong nigger feeling. She sat
(in that photo in the yearbook I showed Vashti) getting into
new blues, from the old ones, the trips and passions
showered on her by her own. Hypnotizing me, from so far
ago, from that vantage of knowledge passed on to her passed on
to me and all the other black people of our time.
When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to
black people. May they pick me apart and take the
useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave
the bitter bullshit rotten white parts
alone.
Works Cited
Anti-Defamation League. Amiri Baraka: In His Own Words. http://www.adl.org/anti_semitism/baraka_words.asp. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
Baraka, A. I Will Not Apologize. http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html Retrieved 16 May 2010.
Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. New York: Twayne, 1980.
Fischel, Jack. The New Anti-Semitic Axis:Holocaust Denial, Black Nationalism, and the Crisis on Our College Campuses. Virginia Quarterly Review pp. 210-226, Spring 1995.
Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-Modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Samual R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Knight, Arthur and Kit. (Eds.) The Beat Vision. Paragon House, New York, 1987.
Ossman, David. The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets. New York: Corinth, 1963.
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Los Angeles: U California P, 2004.
Ya Salaam, Kalamu. Conversation with Amiri Baraka. http://www.black-collegian.com/african/baraka-a1299.shtml. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
There are faxes for this order.
