Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.Today at the beginning of class you took a short quiz over Sommers's and Reid-Walsh's articles. I then gave a short presentation on gender and sexuality in children's literature. You can access that presentation HERE and on the left hand side of the blog. Next, I asked the class to break up into four small groups to work on a series of different literary interpretation exercises; each group spent ten minutes at each "station," and the final group at each station presented the completed work to the class. On one white board, students worked on identifying the types of conflicts present in Blume's novel; you can access a handout including the skeleton of this activity HERE. On another white board, students created a bubble map for the term "girlhood" citing page numbers from Reid-Walsh's chapter. On another section of white board, students used a list of critical terms (Hintz and Tribunella's models of childhood, Hintz and Tribunella's three tensions that define children's lit, Trites's entwicklungsroman and bildungsroman, Nodelman's home-away-home, Reid-Walsh's girlhood, Butler's gender as performance, Joseph's liminality, Gruner's unschooling, Sommers's sororal dialogism) to talk about events, characters, passages, and the representation of childhood in Blume's novel. On the back table, students worked to group significant passages from Blume's novel (written on post-it notes by students at the start of class) into different categories. We then spent time discussing your thoughts and responses to Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Critical Approaches to Margaret: Sommers and Reid-Walsh
After the break, I asked you to work in small groups to complete a longer annotation (break down piece by piece) of Sommers's critical article. You can access that document HERE. Because this article was a bit more difficult and contains some heavy Bakhtinian narrative theory, we spent a good deal of time working through the article. I asked each group to be responsible for a series of five questions relating to four or five pages of the reading. Each group then presented their responses to the larger group. I asked each group to type up their response and send them to me. You can access the completed document HERE. We spent some time at the end of class defining Sommers's "sororal dialogism" which means sisterly communication and disclosure across time, space, and cultures; he identifies this sororal dialogism as happening between the reader and the text. We also discussed some textual examples of this term.
Key Questions From Class
How is growing up gendered? What is the relationship between religion and puberty in the novel? What are the significant conflicts in Margaret?
What is the value of the problem novel (and the entwicklungsroman)? How have these genres been critiqued? What is sororal dialogism? And how/where do we see it in the novel? What is Sommers's argument? What is the relationship between Margaret and the reader? Where in the novel do we see Margaret directly address the reader? Why, according to Sommers, does she do this?
Homework
- Read Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming
- Read Jacqueline Woodson's "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke" and Deborah Stevenson's review of Brown Girl Dreaming
In Jaqueline Woodson’s _Brown Girl Dreaming_ we are introduced to a child that is born into an era of segregation and discrimination. We are familiarized with what time period this child lives in, in the first short poem “February 12, 1963”. The descriptions the narrator (child- Jaqueline) uses in this first poem are things like; “a country caught between black and white"…and “the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed…” (p.12). Because of the time period and the specific events that are happening, the childhood character in this novel would be a ‘child soldier’. In Hintz and Tribunella’s _Historicizing Childhood_ they explain a child soldier character as one “that either witnesses to or participants in wars.” It gives the child a persona of less innocence because she is exposed to so much and also the curiosity from growing up and being introduced to knew things is still prevalent in the story. Jackie could also be considered to be a Romantic child in the historical models of childhood. She has a lot of innocence to her and is curious and susceptive to the things around her, these examples might consider her to be a romantic childhood character.
ReplyDeleteAlso, _Brown Girl Dreaming_ is a domestic fiction novel. It is a domestic fiction novel because it is realistic of everyday life during a civil war and at that time home can be a very dangerous place depending on your social class and ethnicity. People in the novel face power relations and plays a role in the plot of the novel and the thoughts and actions of Jaqueline. Jackie emphasizes in all of her stories the events that are happening and how the place she lives in and the time she is growing up in is very important and can change history and her future. on page 12 in _Brown Girl Dreaming_ Jackie says “February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want”, which means that it is a time of change. Another reason why this is a domestic fiction is because the emphasis that wealth and poverty has in the novel and the relations with family and community. The Woodson family in the story plays a big role in the community and the history of the family is what influences what everyone is the next generations decides to do and help influence their success. An example of the how the Woodson family plays a big role would be on page 18, “the Woodsons of Ohio know what the Woodsons coming before them left.” We will later see in the novel the large role that the family’s history plays in the novel.
Would you agree that the Jaqueline would be a child soldier childhood character or a romantic child childhood character? What other childhood character would Jaqueline be considered to be? How do the movements and events effect Jackie’s character?
Word count: 507 words