Select 2 of the essays from your focus, Psychological or Mythological, and write an annotation of the key elements of the argument.
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Jena
5/14/2013 03:04:54 am
The Structural Model by Freud talks about the iceberg theory. The tip of the iceberg is our conscious, which is everything we are aware of that is stored away. Next comes the water, this is a symbol of everything we are not aware of or not have experienced in life. Our superego falls next which is the moral part of us and develops due to the moral and ethical restrains placed upon us by our caregivers. Your ego comes next, based on principle, we understand people have desires and that sometimes being selfish can hurt us. Then our unconscious falls beneath, your unconscious drives us by Freud’s view. Our underlying emotions, experiences in our lives, beliefs, feelings, and impulses are not available to us at the conscious level but the unconscious level. Finally beneath the depths of this iceberg and water is the Id factor, which we are born with. The Id is an important attribute to our personalities even as newborns, it allows are basic needs to be met. Freud states “Id is based on pleasure principles.” When the child is uncomfortable, hungry, in pain, too hot, too cold, or needs attention they will speak threw their Id factor by crying, in order to meet their needs.
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Jena2
5/14/2013 03:52:02 am
The way Freud feels of Oedipus and how the literature explains the story is “psychodrama in various displaced, abnormal, and/or exaggerated ways.” The Oedipus Complex is shortly explained of the primary points of the story. Oedipus destined by the orical to kill his father and take his mother to be his wife, knowing this will happen Oedipus extracts his eyes, but fate had it in for him and both crimes were committed. The repressed primal desire will be mentally sane but will soon arise again in dreams or in literature.
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Sonja
5/14/2013 07:20:02 pm
Annotation on Theme of Flight
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Jena
5/14/2013 07:20:27 pm
Valerie Smith, “Introduction”, in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press. 1995, 1-18, depicts the aspiring novel of Toni Morrison. She speaks of individuality that Milkman will come to see by the end of the novel, traveling through his Hero’s Journey. Smith proclaims that the Dead family was the “nuclear family that has traditionally been a stable and critical feature not only of American society but of Western civilization in general.” The Dead family, Macon, Pilate, Milkman, Hager, and so forth were the American symbol of values in the West. This validates the incongruity, established expectations with the difficulties of life in black American communities. Going into depth of Pilate’s life, Macon’s younger sister, she was “introduce[d] a quality of ‘enchantment’ into the novel. Smith believed Pilate was the character to show status of compassion, respect, loyalty, and generosity for this novel. Smith believed Pilate symbolized her physical condition was her lack of dependence on others. What endangered her brother’s life, Macon, never destroyed Pilate, because she prevented it from ever happening by isolating herself. Milkman’s trip was a huge part of the novel and Smith states is this man not knowing anything about his family past, but for some few rough foggy spots, this trip would not solve anything physically. Mentally Milkman thrives from the trip he experiences. Smith states “his trip south holds the key to his liberation is correct, although it is not gold that saves him.” Which is true he never finds the gold which he longs for to set himself free, but finding the truth of himself and his family is what truly sets him free. Learning of the song which he himself completes now has a better understanding of the history that is his family. Smith tells that Milkman’s identity emerges “when he allows himself to accept his personal and familial past.” The novel Morrison wrote, and the interpretation Valerie Smith wrote explain the Western meaning of individualism and creations of identity.
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M. Jones
5/14/2013 07:30:34 pm
Valerie Smith’s “Introduction,” discusses how Milkman ‘finds’ himself. In the begging of “Song of Solomon” the readers are given the idea that Milkman is, as Smith stated, “destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy he receives from his father, Macon Dead.” (1) Because Milkman is so attached to material he has not had the time to understand himself or others. However, the reason for materialistic matters to become so important to Milkman is not his fault since he had his father to thank for implanting such values in his head. Because of the values Milkman has, “his perception that escaping from his past and his responsibilities and finding material treasure will guarantee him a sense of his own identity.” (4) Milkman believes that once he has money he can become independent from his father and so he thinks that it will allow him to become his own person, but the irony hits his train of thought. Milkman is attached to the money and the need to own things because his father told him so, it is a light bulb handed over to him. And so, his independence, if there was treasure, would trace right back to the man he trying so desperately to escape. Instead of finding treasure that he is seeking for, Milkman learns of his family’s history. Because of this he makes an “intimate connection with the land for which his grandfather died.” (5) This leads to Milkman’s end of the struggle of finding his own identity. “When Milkman learns the whole song and can sing it to Pilate as she has sung it to others, he assumes his destiny. He understands his yearning toward flight as a way in which his ancestral past makes itself known and felt to him. Milkman's sense of identity emerges when he allows himself to accept his personal and familial past.” (5-6)
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Bradley Runyon
5/14/2013 07:31:04 pm
Bradley Runyon
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August
5/14/2013 07:53:40 pm
August Witte
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Maddie B.
5/16/2013 02:46:41 am
"Every Goodbye Ain't Gone": The Semiotics of Death, Mourning, and Closural Practice in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, by Cedric Gael Bryant
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Maddie B.
5/16/2013 03:11:22 am
The South in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home by Catherine Carr Lee
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Emily Y.
5/16/2013 04:26:34 am
Annotation 1:
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M. Jones
5/16/2013 04:59:49 am
Gary Storhoff opens his "Anaconda love" with a quote, “I think that if people put so much emphasis on family and children, it is because they live in great isolation; they have no friends, no love, no affection, nobody. They are alone; therefore they have children in order to have somebody.” (Simone de Beauvoir, 1) The quote is most likely referring to Ruth’s longing for a relationship that she can benefit from emotionally. “Morrison's view of family relations depicted in her novels is considerably more textured, since she is interested in the etiology and the consequences of enmeshment.” (2) This statement explains the insanity of the characters Morrison creates in the “Song of Solomon.” “The clinical tension between the self and the family is intensified by an exclusive focus on either the individual,” (3) hence the concentration on each individual character throughout the novel. Storhoff continues to point out psychological issues within the family, as well as, Hagar’s obsession for Milkman. “Although most criticism blames Milkman for Hagar's madness and death, Pilate and Reba are also partly responsible, for they are emotionally enmeshed in Hagar's life.” (23) Milkman causes Hagar’s ‘craziness’ to unleash, however, Pilate and Reba don’t exactly help Hagar overcome the hurdle she has been given.
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Emily Y.
5/16/2013 05:52:02 am
Annotation 2. ... I might have already submitted this. But I would choose this version. :D
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E Bell
5/16/2013 06:33:45 am
In her critical essay, “The Fathers May Soar: Folklore and Blues in Song of Solomon,” Naomi Van Tol examines author Toni Morrison’s use of African American mythology and culture in her modernistic reprise of the myth of the “flying African.” Van Tol highlights Morrison’s emphasis on collective psychology and her insistence on “a distinctly Afrocentric literary approach,’ rather than “literature written from a white point of view.” This stance demonstrates Morrison’s view that “understanding self and past is always a project of community,” and the subject of self-realization cannot be universalized at the expense of its deep cultural significance. This sense of community, Van Tol argues, no doubt arose as a direct result of slavery, which contributed to the development of the “enduring strength of the cultural cohesion that existed and still exists among African Americans.” However, Van Tol asserts that Morrison does not simply characterize the black community as simply a “monodimensional role of passive victims,” but that she recognizes and communicates “much of the linguistic and institutional side of African life” that was lost through slavery. Van Tol goes on to argue that the common struggle of slaves lead to a distinct culture that relied on oral tradition and mythology not only to preserve information, but to shape that information into a collectively shared myth- not so much a pantheon of mythological figures as the concept of the mysterious and powerful “African myth.” This ever-evolving, almost living, myth, Van Tol points out, served to help develop many facets of African American culture, namely the blues, one of many “musical expressions of the cultural need to tell the story of a people,” that serves to “provide a way of recognizing and sharing human pain in order to overcome it.” Van Tol also notes the commonly accepted differences in gender roles of the arts form: female blues often sings of lost love or “home,” while male blues cries of freedom and “rootlessness.” It is this “rootlessness” which so often leads “women [to] become the de facto guardians of cultural history,” preserving the heritage of themselves and their descendants, as well as the African myth.
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Cassidy Harless
5/17/2013 06:01:35 am
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August Witte
5/22/2013 05:17:08 am
August Witte
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E Bell 2
5/26/2013 06:41:49 am
In his critical essay, “Anaconda Love,” Gary Storhoff explores the use of psychoanalytic themes in Toni’s Morrison’s Song of Solomon. He begins by evaluating the oft-touted Oedipal complex of the novel- the disturbingly sexual relationship between Milkman and his mother, his hostile rejection (and, oddly, simultaneous emulation) of his father. While Storhoff does not disagree that Morrison did in fact employ this complex in her novel, he argues that “too exclusive a focus on ‘Oedipal issues’ leads invariably both to an oversimplification of the complex generational relationships within the family and to a diminution of the reader's sympathies that Morrison attempts to evoke for her characters.” He goes on to assert that this oversimplification results in a reader’s tendency to quickly attach moral evaluations of characters that Morrison did not intend, and can easily dilute the nuances and complexities present in the novel and its intriguing characters. However, Storhoff continues to agree with the larger psychoanalytic perspective, stating that certain features of the novel serve as “structural mechanism[s] that [establish] each member's relational identity within the family,” and many of the conflicts, both inter-and intrapersonal, can be attributed to the loss or corruption of these features (Storhoff notes Lincoln’s Heaven, the farm where Pilate and Macon Jr. grew up, which represents the only setting in which the family is not dysfunctional). Indeed, the very nature of each character can change in accordance with a single (but traumatic) change in their environment, Storhoff maintains. The gradual deterioration of each character’s morality causes the destruction of the family unit, and, by extension, the community at large. As each detaches from the cooperation of the family to pursue their own selfish goals, they strain their relationships and solidify into “pillars,” as Storhoff calls them, each representing a particular behavior responsible for another’s misery, and each partially maintaining the precarious foundations of the family. And yet, Storhoff asserts, this schismatic pattern does not result in a completely disjointed family, but rather a disturbingly “enmeshed” one, in which the farther each member draws away from the unit, the more entangled in one another’s lives they become. This pattern describes a sort of exponential downward spiral, in which the more compressed the unit, the more broken it becomes- but it can never be fully pulled apart. Storhoff concludes by affirming that only Milkman can successfully separate himself from the family, as he is the only member who attempts to rectify the situation rather than simply escape from it. While the unit has already been ripped and manipulated beyond repair, Morrison illustrates the possibility of partial recovery (or, at the very least, a pause of destruction) through increased understanding rather than violent willful detachment.
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Nicole T
5/28/2013 07:13:32 pm
Denise Heinze, The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels, University of Georgia Press: Athens and London, 1993.
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Cullen
5/31/2013 01:52:38 am
The idea that The Song of Solomon was just a novel written with no allegorical purpose and with no real life influence would not be plausible. Toni Morrison used many elements of storytelling to reach out to her intended audience, which at the time would be black families coming from a low to middle class background, but also to families in general. The Deads family exemplify the meaning of a phlegmatic group of people. Everyone in the Dead’s family has there own dysfunction, and they each have different versions of every major event that has occurred to the family. As Valerie Smith states in her “Introduction” essay, “The Deads exemplify the patriarchal, nuclear family that has traditionally been a stable and critical feature not only of American society but of Western civilization in general.” Besides the countless flaws within the families, we see many other conflicts in this book between characters, such as Milkman and Guitar’s feud, Milkman and Hagar’s relationship (which is technically familial). The only character in the Song of Solomon that that really is good natured and excels in social skills is Pilate, but Pilate lacks other qualities. As Valerie Smith states, “While Macon's love of property and money determines the nature and quality of his relationships, Pilate's sheer disregard for status, occupation, hygiene, and manners is accompanied by an ability to affirm spiritual values such as compassion, respect, loyalty, and generosity.”
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Cullen
5/31/2013 02:20:31 am
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