African American Literature Assignment | Custom Assignment Help

My name is Tarrance Anderson. There will be 2 topic choices to select with a short passage to read. Thank so much and good luck to us both! Further instructions are provided

English 338, African American Literature II

Linda F. McDonald, Assistant professor

Spring 2020

Final Exam Essay

Due for underclassmen by 11:59 PM on Friday, May 8

Write a well-organized, well-supported and complete, and grammatically, mechanically, and stylistically correct essay in which you interpret one of the topics below.  Your essay must include the following: (1) a clear and specific thesis statement, (2) a topic sentence that supports the thesis in each body paragraph, (3) specific supporting details (from the work/works you are discussing) for the topic sentences, (4) an appropriate conclusion, and (5) a minimum of 800 words.  Please work carefully and do not forget to proofread.

Additional Guidelines

• Must be the students’ own interpretation based on the student’s understanding of his/her reading of the texts.  This is not a research paper. Use only the works themselves and the notes and resource links that I gave you. research must be properly documented both in-text and in the works cited.
• Please support your thesis through your own explanations as well as through quotes from the primary works.  Do not plagiarize and do not attempt to write this essay without reading the primary works.  To avoid plagiarism, all quotes, paraphrases, and summaries must be properly documented by using in-text citations.  Use appropriate words and phrases to introduce quotes; place quotes in quotation marks or in block form; follow each quote with discussion from you—not from research.
• Please include a works cited to document your primary sources and any approved secondary sources that you use.  Approved secondary sources are additional material that I gave you.  Again:  Proceed with caution on the secondary sources.  Also, make sure that for every primary and/or secondary source that you quote, paraphrase or briefly summarize, you have an in-text citation and the bibliographic information is correctly listed on the works cited page.
• Use the anthology to document a work from an anthology like Norton and Three Negro Classics.

A Word to the Wise:  If you are stressed, divide your time as follows:

1. It should take you about 45 minutes to an hour to read one work and the same amount of time to reread or listen to the work. Think of this as your two hours of study time.
2. If classes were not virtual, you would have a 2-hr final this week. Therefore, if your schedule is tight, set aside at least 2 hours for this essay. You may take longer, but 2 hours is the minimum amount of time you should spend on this assignment.

See topics on following pages.

ENG 338 Final Exam Topics

(Choose One)

1. We began the semester with a discussion of what it means to be African American. Read the statements made by African American writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison during the period we were referred to as “Negroes.” In the 1964 essay “The Literature of the Negro in the United States” from his collection of essays White Man, Listen! Wright says, “Truly, you must know that the word Negro in America means something not racial or biological, but something purely social, something made in the United States” (80).  In 1966, Ralph Ellison elaborated on this idea in his essay “The World and the Jug” from Shadow and Act.  Ellison states:

It is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American experience, the social and political predicament; a sharing of that “concord of sensibilities” which the group expresses through historical circumstances and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger American culture. Being a Negro American has to do with the memory of slavery and the hope for emancipation and the betrayal by allies and the revenge and contempt inflicted by our former masters after the Reconstruction, and the myths, both Northern and Southern, which are propagated in justification of that betrayal. It involves, too, a special attitude toward the waves of immigrants who have come later and passed us by. (136)

If literature reflects the culture that produces it, then African American literature reveals a great deal about what it means to be an African born and reared in America. Using four of the literary works we have studied, define the African American experience.  You might want to come up with a list of characteristics and use one or more works to validate each characteristic.  Whether you agree or disagree with Wright and Ellison, feel free to use them as springboards.  Comment on and show the degree to which the African American experience has changed since these works were written.

2. Even though both African American males and African American females equally face discrimination, injustice, stereotyping, and limited mobility, the issues and experiences of the two groups are different. Using works that you were assigned by Hurston, Larsen, Wright, and Baldwin, compare and contrast the issues (physical, social, emotional, and/or political) facing each group. You will want a thesis that points out contrasts.  However, in the body of the paper, as you make contrasts, you may want to make comparisons within the contrasts.  For example, although both African American males and females are treated as inferior to whites, the African American male attempts to preserve some aspect of his manhood and dignity by exerting power over the black female.  This is why Hurston’s character Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God refers to the black woman as the mule of the world. Janie states,

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” (1078)

By using the derogatory epithet “nigger woman,” Hurston further emphasizes her point the not even the black man respects the black woman.  Like the mule, the African American woman is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  She is overworked, physically abused, and dismissed as ignorant and insignificant (even dispensable).

3. Baldwin, Wright, and several other authors that we have studied believed that writers have a responsibility to promote social justice for minorities. At the same time, however, the works of these authors have universal appeal because they speak to themes, emotions, and experiences that can be understood and felt by everyone regardless of race, class, gender, and time period.  Using Baldwin, Wright and two other authors we have studied, explain what features of the works you chose give the works universal appeal.  Discuss, providing examples from the texts.  For example, Wright uses the theme of hunger not just as a physical but also a metaphorical concept.  While someone who has never experienced a shortage of food might not relate to hunger in the physical sense, everyone has experienced a deep yearning for something that he or she lacks: education, love, companionship, etc.  Also, Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” shows racism not through the eyes of the victim, but through the eyes of a white racist. Why? What is the effect of this on universality?  Do not use my examples.  I offer them as just that: examples.

NOTE: For each topic, I have highlighted the essence of the topic and then made suggestions regarding ways you might approach the topic.