Brand

Main Objective: Learning how to research and write a research essay about a literary text

This includes:

• Learning how to ask and answer a research question
• Understanding what a good argument is and what a bad argument is, and why
• Understanding and summarizing someone else's argument
• Making an intervention into someone else's argument to advance your own claims
• Finding evidence in a text to support your argument
• Learning how to find and assess outside sources or evidence
• Learning how to read a literary text and identify the relation between what the text says (the text's content) with how it is said (the text's form)
• Learning how to communicate your thoughts in written form clearly and concisely
• Learning how to do citations correctly

What skills are transferable?

• Strong communication and written skills, including the ability to write and communicate in diverse styles and the ability to communicate evidence or research to an audience

• The ability to identify and respond to various perspectives and arguments, and situate yourself in relation to these arguments

• Empathy for other perspectives and concerns because you don't live in a bubble

Other questions:

• Will discussions take place in smaller groups?
• When do we do the peer review workshops, and what are they?
• Will be get lots of guidance for assignments, particularly the final assignment?
• How will I be able to think of the ideas we discuss in class about literary texts on my own?
• What's a prospectus?
• Will the readings we do in class be part of our assignments?
• What do we have to do for the final?
• Will we be doing more readings about Canada?

More questions???

You can also make an appointment with me via email to discuss any further concerns or questions

Diaspora

Dionne Brand

Canadian author

Born in Trinidad and Tobago

Former poet laureate of Toronto

Point of View

First, Second, and Third Person

"My grandfather said he knew what people we come from. I reeled off all the names I knew. Yoruba? Ibo? Ashanti? Mandingo? He said no to all of them, saying that he would know it if he heard it. I was thirteen. I was anxious for him to remember." (3).

"The rufous hummingbird travels five thousand miles from summer home to winter home and back. This hummingbird can fit into the palm of a hand. Its body defies the known physics of energy and flight. It knew its way before all known map-makers. It is a bird whose origins and paths are the blood of its small body. It is a bird whose desire to find its way depends upon drops of nectar from flowers" (6).

Which point of view is this? Who is speaking?

"You hear that you are living elsewhere. The BBC announcer is calling you. Telling you the news. Elsewhere is not a bad place at all. It is simply elsewhere. You have heard it described as an island. You have read of islands, such as in the Tempest described as uninhabited except for monsters and spirits ... You have seen the borders of maps of islands, natives, nubile and fierce. You are living on an island, banished or uninhabited, or so it seems through the voice of the BBC. You are therefore already mythic" (13).

Who is speaking here?

Second person

You use the second-person point of view to address the reader. The second person uses the pronouns “you,” “your,” and “yours.”

7. Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark, and who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

8. I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro, bearing slavery's scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek

-- Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"

Are these uses of the 2nd person different? If so, how?

Genre

A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind.

What genre is Brand's text?

The Door of No Return

What is the Door of No Return?

House of Slaves (Maison des Esclaves), Gorée Island (off the coast of Dakar, Senegal), 1776

Held to be the final exit of enslaved Africans before boarding slave ships to the "New world"

"There are maps to the Door of No Return. The physical door. ... But to the Door of No Return which is illuminated in the consciousness of Blacks in the Diaspora there are no maps."

"The Door of No Return is of course no place at all but a metaphor for place. Ironically, or perhaps suitably, it is no one place but a collection of places" (18).

...

"The door is a place, real, imaginary and imagined. As islands and dark continets are" (19).

"The door signifies the historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora. It accounts for the ways we observe and are observed as people, whether it's through the lens of social injustice or the lens of human accomplishments. The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know. Yet it exists as the ground we walk. Every gesture our bodies make somehow gestures towards this door. What interests me primarily is probing the Door of No Return as consciousness" (25).

Exercise

Sources in a piece of academic writing are the materials from which the writer gathers ideas and information.

In terms of your research paper, the literary texts you decide to write about are one source that you will draw upon to make an argument, looking for evidence within the text to support your claims about it.

In addition, you will also look for outside sources. Today's exercise, as such, asks you to explore how Brand herself uses outside sources within her writing. For eg, where does she quote or paraphrase others and what effect does that have? Look, in particular, for references that are drawn from newspapers, books, or sentences that begin "According to x"

In other words, where do the voices of others appear within Brand's text, and what effect does this have?

Groups

1. Victor Adu-Poku, Nectarios, Alanna, Nithya

2. Jack, Ahad, Alina, Emily Young

3. Taha, Sylvia, Emma Beach, Jamie

4. Sergio, Nicholas Heida, Julia, Nivedha

5. Ikraam, Mackenzie, Dexter, Alyssa

6. Sabine, Legniman, Harnoor, Roxanne

7. Erin, Victor Lieu, Natalia, Bryce

8. Jenna, Derryk, Bria, Jayden

9. Natalie, Cassie, Raj, Benjamin

10. Vinetta, Alejandro, Nic, Jingwen