CRG for Thursday, March 20
To be written and submitted in class
In the excerpt we read from Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison evokes a number of concepts we have already studied, including defamiliarization, the power of connotation over denotation, and the role of the "writerly" text. She bases virtually everything she says in this piece on the complexities of signification and on the power of language and discourse to create worlds. She introduces something new and powerful in the idea that we represent some difficult components of our world as absent or, to put it differently, that the corpus of our cultural representations often works very hard to deny the presence of something, sometimes of something so central that it constitutes what is crucial to our very identity as a coherent group. Similarly, in the Birnbaum article we read we noted that sometimes an identity is discursively created not only through difference, but also by obfuscating the connections it has to other discourses, connections on which it is no less dependent (think about what we said concerning gender's dependence on race in The Awakening, for example).
You're going to write 578 words this time—and please double space—on how signifiers can create an absence just as powerfully as they can create a presence; on how discourses not only create their objects, but how they depend on other discourses to achieve their own identities and stability as discourses. You will compare Toni Morrison's notion of "Africanism" in US literature and culture to Birnbaum's contention that Edna's creation of a gendered identity for herself depends on the support of others, a support that she cannot acknowledge.
I won't constrain how you structure your essay this time, but I will say that If I were writing this essay, I'd probably think a lot about why Morrison believes that this issue comes to the forefront more powerfully if one approaches the US literary canon not so much as a reader, but, rather, as a writer (who understands what one must do to construct a complex character, scene, or other sort of literary presence through language). I would think about how Edna is in effect writing her own identity as Birnbaum describes it, in a way very similar to what Morrison is arguing. It is probably by now not worth mentioning, but just in case: it doesn't matter whether you agree with Morrison or Birnbaum or not. All that matters it that you present their arguments coherently.
You should feel not only free, but slightly obligated to invoke other readings we have done this semester in order to make your point as strongly and as persuasively as you can. You must certainly make explicit reference to points made by Morrison and Birnbaum, and any others you would like to include.