teaching journal

more "Sonny's Blues"

Tuesday we had a fantastic discussion using the agenda method originated by my undergraduate literature professor. It's pretty simple but effective...if folks read. Everyone comes in and makes comments, offers questions on the reading and I write all the stuff like a fiend on the board. Then the readers choose which items to discuss and we're off.

I keep saying in class that I've read this story a gazillion times and I still learn something new each time. Tuesday, that happened again when I learned two things I'd never noticed before. Readers said that not only does the narrator remain nameless but all the male characters are unnamed, except for Sonny and Creole. So we made a list. And the only characters who are named are Sonny, Creole, Isabel, and Gracie. Everybody else is nameless. Why?

The other observation was that every time characters in the story are having a deep conversation or revelation, they're looking out the window. And it's true! The narrator is looking out the subway windows when he reads about Sonny at the start; the folks on Sundays look outside at the darkness they see; the narrator and Sonny look out the window when they have their first honest talk about Sonny's drug use...but the huge scene at the end when the narrator listens to Sonny play, there is no looking-out-of-windows. Does that mean we need to look inward...or look AND listen to others for the answers we need?

When we were talking about Baldwin's use of dark and light imagery, someone said, "That's too deep," and it wasn't a good kind of "deep." You know, when someone says, "Wow, that's deep," and you both marvel at the complexity of something. This was more like, "That's just too much thought about all that." And I remember when I was first studying literature, I used to complain in class that analyzing just ripped apart the piece, took away its art, somehow...as if to respect a piece of artwork, one just has to experience it, not analyze it. Something must have changed because today I make my living studying literature. Today, I think that studying literature just means creating new stories. We make up stories about the stories. And we do that so we can make the story we read ours in meaningful ways.

posted by Sandra @ 4:04 AM