AMS 001C Fall 2019

Breadgivers Themes

Diversity Identity Construction Americanization Boundaries between:Self and the World Old World vs. New World values Jewishness vs. Americanness

Psychology of Discovery

A self-authorizing and empowering journey

Me and a Gun- Tori Amos 1991

About Amos' experience during her rape. psychology of discovery.

Education

123 million young people worldwide still lack basic reading and writing skills; girls comprise 61 percent of that number•Gender disparities remain high precisely where education is able to help shape a young person's future—at secondary and higher levels of education

Performing Arts

Art forms in which artists use their voices and/or the movements of their bodies, often in relation to other objects, to convey artistic expressionPerforming arts include a variety of disciplines, but all are intended to be performed in front of a live audience

Indictment of Revenge

Assembling evidence in an alternative jurisdiction

Performances of the self

Autobiographical performances (or performances of the "self") mark the multiple, non-unitary constitution of the self, and the notion that the "self", rather than being immutable, fixed, given, deep, essential, is, in fact, always a performance of a self (or selves)Criticism of this "genre" tends to be negative, most often reading "performing the self" as implicitly or essentially "narcissistic" or "egotistical"

Anzia Yezierska

Born around 1880 in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, in the Russian Empire Immigrated with her family to NY @ 9 Settled in the Jewish slums of the Lower East Side in the 1890s Published 5 novels, 5 collections of short stories and numerous articles Bread Givers Goldwyn gave her a contract of $100,000, and the press hailed her the "Sweatshop Cinderella" Grew frustrated by her alienation from the Jewish ghetto and by insincere nature of Hollywood Returned to live in NY in late 1920s and remained a popular author until the Great Depression in the 1930s

Maya Angelou

Born in 1928 in St. Louis Lived with her mother for just a short time Raped by her mother's boyfriend Was mute for several years Raised by grandmother after parents separatedLived in a small segregated town in Arkansas At age 17 had her only child, Guy Worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco 1960s: Lived abroad, first in Egypt and then in Ghana, working as an editor and a freelance writer 1964: Returned to U.S.; helped Malcolm X. with Organization of Afro-American Unity

Stand Up Comedy

Breaking down the boundary of creator and performer—stand up comedians need to perform their own creations Entertainment , BUT ALSO an expression of citizens' involvement within their geographical communities and beyond Performances as mediated expressions of identity; simultaneous construction of personal identity and cultural critiqueLive experience: intimate and democratic, cathartic

Memoir

Concerns a specific, concentrated period within a life. Conveys the visceral effect of personal experience that gives history a more human context. Recounts a personal story into its niche in contemporary history, and thus illustrates the influence of world-wide events and movements upon individual personal destinies

Don't Let Me Get Me- P!nk 2002

Follows Pink's life—from school days to LA career•Aggressive tone•Centered around the self•Self-hating lyrical content ?•Credible personal pain•Break free from image-making industry demands Psychology of the self- trying to figure out who she is and what she wants out of life The

Charlayne Woodard

Grandma video. Actor; PlaywrightTwo-time Obie Award winner and Tony Award nomineeTrained at Goodman School of Drama; teaches at USCWritten and performed 4critically acclaimed solo playsIn Real Life: play received a Backstage West Garland Award and NAACP Awards for best playwright and actor; Woodard received an Audelco Award and was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for best solo performance Psychology of Discovery: who is he without her grandmother in her life? who is she as a performer now? her GMA helped her start her career out. Performance Audience: helped her get through a difficult time, were there for her, her story changed due to the audience performance of the self

Coal Miner's Daughter- Loretta Lynn 1970

Her signature song, one of the genre's most widely known songs Themes: identification of the self as a matter of choice, legacy motivation of writing, nostalgia. Identity, it's not always fixed. She is identifying as her father's daughter

Autobiography is/can be

Historical record, literary artifact, psychological case history, spiritual confession, didactic essay, ideological statement

Hurston's Cultural commentary

Hurston represents stereotypes as different forms of herself. Understanding that she was at "the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or weep," Hurston undertakes these many different roles in order to report on the culture out of which New Negro modernism emergedHurston's statement about slavery being the price for civilization mirrors the ideas of white artists and intellectuals, who looked to blacks for originalityThe statements made in "How it Feels to be Colored Me," can be considered subversiveLike the creators of folk culture, Hurston subscribed to a communicative tone that could simultaneously enact stereotypes and decry their presenceIt is only with a white man for company that she becomes the "primitive" ZoraIt is white patrons who commodify her activities as a child because of their desire for the "sunshine" she provided through her childish playThe last paragraph of the essay points to Hurston's innate belief that people are all the same, they are different colored paper bags "that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the contents of any greatly." The contrast between this appraisal of humanity and the stereotypes that Hurston allows her persona to take on, illustrates the incongruity between stereotypical personifications of black experience and reality

Chicken Soup- Blondell Cummings 1981

In "Chicken Soup," while scrubbing a floor on her hands and knees—an act of exemplary realism—she repeatedly breaks off, rears up, and shakes, in jagged, convulsive movements, as if she were in a strobe light•Then, with no acknowledgement of this interruption, she goes back, serenely, to scrubbing the floor•This strange back and forthmade the piece very interesting psychologically: the floor-scrubbing so homey and soapy and nice (Cummings wore a white dress), the convulsions so violent and weird•Was this woman happy, doing this domestic task, or did she hate it so much that she was going crazy? •Is it protest art?•A black woman cleaning a white woman's house?•Compelling alternation between realism and surrealism•In the space of a few quick minutes, she turned herself inside out, revealing at once, both in her motions and emotions, the singular affinity between extreme feelings at opposite ends of the affective spectrum•"Chicken Soup" is a portrait of woman as drudge-housewife, shopping, cooking, scrubbing floors; cf. title "Black Bean Soup" Themes: Identity: she has to find who she is while being in this role of caregiver/ cleaner. Performance Art: expressed through the body to an audience and so it can take on many meanings. Speaking voice: a house wife sort of woman/persona psychology of discovery

I Am Malala Slide

Malala's memoir opens the door to some of the greatest challenges of our modern world. It is about politics, education, culture, religion and violence against women and girls. It is a moment in the life of a young girl and in the history of a country. Malala's memoir combines the personal story of a girl's life caught in the vortex of war and religious extremism. Malala's story is remarkable in light of women's role in her culture and the groups fighting to oppress women—in this case the Taliban

Maya/Vivian Relationship

Maya is captivated by Vivian's beauty, strength and aura She admires her mother for her self-reliance, her resilience, and her casual approach to sexuality On the other hand, she recognizes Vivian Baxter's flaws Gradually, Maya depends on her mother As she matures, Maya becomes more in control of her feelings/reactions, and more objective in her assessment of Vivian Baxter's personality

Mom and Me and Mom

Mom and Me and Mom as an account of Maya's reconciliation with the woman who had sent her away Maya's identity evolves as it synthesizes the extremes of her paternal grandmother and her biological mother Thematic continuity is created by the interplay between mother and child Episodic structure; narrator's disregard for linear sequence > turning negative experiences into inspiration

Puerto Rican Identities•

Native Puerto Ricans find themselves trying to maintain a sense of cultural autonomy in the face of American hegemony, while simultaneously recognizing their interconnectedness and inclusion within the United States' political and governmental system•On the other hand, Puerto Ricans choosing to live in the mainland United States face the racial, ethnic, and linguistic discrimination that too often attends to those groups or individuals that are socially marked as "Others"•Hybrids like Santiago: In-between identity in which their bodies and ethnicity register as "Other" in the United States, while their movement within the diaspora casts suspicion on their cultural "authenticity"

Life Writing and Audience

Orally performing an autobiographical act minimizes the distancebetween the narrator and the narratee, the implied audience and the consumer, when the story is addressed to a live audience that immediately and audibly respondsTelling a life story in front of a live audience-- palpably there, soliciting, assessing, even judging the story being toldThe audience directly influences the presentation of identity◦It determines the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of others◦It has an effect on which narrative itineraries or intentionalities are incorporated and which are silenced◦Its presence may make the narrator adopt certain autobiographical voices and/or mute others

Hasan Minhaj

Political Science major UC DavisStand Up comedy > The Daily Show(2014)Talks about growing up a child of Muslim Indian immigrants and weaves together themes of race, heartbreak, forgiveness and loveCombines storytelling with comedy, resulting in a show that is both funny and, at times, serious

This American Life

Public radio podcast since 1995. Harper Highschool

Life Writing and the performing arts

Self presentation can be enacted in many media—from short feature and documentary films to theater pieces, to installations, to performance art in music, dance, and monologue etc.

Breadgivers Context

Set during the 1920s; New York's Lower East Side Industrial capitalism Social stratification / Class conflict Economic instability Immigration Novel deviates from tradition of Jewish immigrant writing Realist narrative strategies Title: women who make "bread" for home

Born in the USA - Bruce Springsteen 1984

Story of a Vietnam vet who returned home, scarred by his experiences in the war, only to discover that the economy in his hometown was crumbling and he had little hope of a better future or even a job •Decisive attachment to political and sociocultural issues, at a time when Ronald Reagan was reviving a patriotic pride by reaffirming the values of prosperity, expansion, and world domination of the US Indictment of Revenge: the US should not have done this

Franklinesque

Studying and writing one's life as useful—practically and morally; an exercise in democratic citizenship

Zora Neale Hurston

Themes-Self realizationImportance of Self-IdentitySegregation and Racial IdentificationHeavy black dialect--an artistic aesthetic that prioritized the creative significance of working class black culture to the creation of "high" artCultural commentary on stereotypes and misconceptions

Antin

Themes: Americanization, immigrant identities

Harper Highschool - Rules to live by

Themes: Education, Gun Violence,

Legacy

Writing life is a gift of love and memory, passed on to posterity

Cleaning Out my closet - Eminem 2002

about his mother..add more psychology of discovery indictment of revenge narrative of filiation w his father

Types of autobiographies

letters diaries memoirs "formal" autobiographies blogs video diaries

Narratives of Filiation

narratives of family. memoirs—usually of a father or mother—by a son or daughter whose parent was remote, unavailable, abusive, or absent. is a story of detection, in which the son or daughter conducts a journey to discover the story of the parent Mom and Me and Mom Homecoming King Breadgivers

imaginative reaffiliation

the desire to know and gain closeness to a parent who was unavailable in life

Conventional autobiographies

thematic religious( conversion, self transformation stories) intellectual fictionalized(novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography)

Autobiography

work of nonfiction about at the life of a person, as told by that person

PL and the Autobiography Genre

•Autobiography as the affirmation of personal identity and a record of social history•Reflects subjective awareness and the wider concerns of society and culture in general•Autobiography as the effort to understand and define the minority experience in America•Ambiguous relationship between Old World customs and New World values and between past and present relationships •Theme of the recreation of the self—self-discovery; rebirth•The autobiographical act (just like the act of immigration) serves as proof of selfhood

Mary Antin

•Born in Polotsk, Russia, on 13th June, 1881•Maryashe was the second of six children•Briefly, while the family business flourished, she studied with private tutors•Family immigrated due to financial hardships (father first; family after 3 years)•@ 13 moved to NY; settled in Boston slums•Placed in K class @ age 13•Attended the Boston Girls' Latin School and had her first poem published in the Boston Herald when she was 15•Letters to uncle published in The American Hebrew (paid for school)•To those who championed the nation's capacity to assimilate the immigrant and the immigrant's capacity to enrich America, Mary Antin became a symbol

Esmeralda Santiago

•Born in San Juan district of Villa Palmeras•Lived in poverty; constant moves•Moved to NY @13

Puerto Rico's In-Betweenness

•Puerto Rico is technically a Commonwealth of the United States•As such, Puerto Rico, has a similar kind of relationship to federalism as does a state, but Puerto Rico lacks certain rights that states enjoy, such as representation on the federal level of government•Puerto Ricans are natural born citizens of the United States and can move freely between the island and mainland •Puerto Ricans can only exert citizenship rights on the federal level-such as voting for the President of the United States-if they reside on the mainland

The Promised Land- Mary Antin

•The Promised Land brought Antin nationwide fame, selling nearly 85,000 copies before her death•Espousing the myth of the American Dream, Antin showed how the idea of America ran counter to the economic, political, and cultural oppression of Europe•Antin pointed to her own adolescent success as proof of the abundant opportunities held out to immigrants who abandoned the old to embrace the new wholeheartedly

Hybridity and Acculturation

•While traditional sociology and anthropology describe the immigrant experience as one of acculturation, the notion of hybridity describes a "multiple acculturation" process whereby immigrants acculturate to mainstream American society and, in turn, bring some of their own cultural practices into mainstream society•The idea of hybridity maintains that all cultures are very much alive and influential