As discussed on Monday, you’ve got a pretty simple job today. I’ve posted two academic articles on Morrison’s novel. Your job is to read them (duh) and comment on them using hypothes.is. A couple of things to think about:

• use the 252 group! Make sure to join if you haven’t: https://hypothes.is/groups/1Y7zVbmM/allred252fa20. And make sure to select it, rather than “public,” from the pull-down.
• note the different approaches to the same text:
  • the Werrlein piece is solidly in the “cultural studies” tradition, which emphasizes that literature is part of a spectrum of cultural forms, from Hollywood to advertising to traditional “folk” forms, and that literature does “cultural work” on its readers, aligning them with certain belief systems or political persuasions.
  • the Roye piece is indebted another strain of Marxist cultural traditions, “postcolonial” criticism, which emphasizes the embeddedness of literary works in long histories of colonial domination of the Global South and emphasizes the workings of struggles over class, race, and gender within literary texts and between those texts and the world they engage.
• For Monday, we’ll look at a very different perspective on Morrison’s work, that of the philosopher George Yancey, getting a taste of a more interdisciplinary approach to the text, so come on Monday ready to roll your sleeves up and think comparatively about different critical approaches.

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