We’ve added an extra day to our plans to keep discussing Beloved. I promised some of the film, and I really hope that we can make time for it tomorrow–though it’s a compromise since we’ll want to spend time discussing the work for Essay 2. Finishing Beloved is a great accomplishment–it’s a difficult, painful text, but one that I hope was rewarding for you to complete. I’m interested to see how you treat the text in your essay and creative projects, and how we can address it in our final discussion on Wednesday.

If you haven’t blogged about Beloved yet (I’m not counting the BHS blogging as blogging about Beloved), or if you want to say more, please post by this evening your response to any of the following questions:

What does it mean to read a story that “was not a story to pass on”?

Why do we read about painful experiences, whether it’s in a character’s experience or a nation’s experience?

Why do you think Toni Morrison would tell this story? What might have motivated her to tell this story, and to then identify it as one that “was not a story to pass on”?

Beloved could be read as the ghost of Sethe’s slain daughter, or as a girl who escaped tortuous enslavement. What does it mean to you as a reader not to know definitively what the answer is?

As always, these posts should be approximately 300 words, use quotations to support your ideas or remind readers of the details you draw on, and should be proofread. As always, the rest of the class should reply with 150-word proofread comments, and as we agreed upon in class, we will not begin our comments with “I agree”–find some other way to connect to the bloggers’ ideas!

I look forward to reading your responses, and to discussing these responses and comments in class on Wednesday.