They are so good at this...

10 September 2025: I want to remember how good my American Fiction class was today. 

We finished up Huck Finn through the lens of really spikey pieces of criticism and we start James on Monday. Before we got that part started, though, listening to their pre-class chatter, I asked them what 9-11 means to their generation. Boy, did that spark an enlightening conversation. (They weren't born then, of course.) Somehow--but it's actually not that much of a mystery if you think about it--we made that connection back to Twain and his, to quote Toni Morrison (whose piece they read!), "amazing, troubling book."

These kids are so angry about our world. Used to the specter of violence hanging over them for every day of their lives. (Returned to my office to see news of a shooting of a right-wing figure on a college campus and a shooting at a high school in Colorado. It's always appalling and soul-crushing, but less shocking every time.)

These students are jaded and cynical and...angry. 

But also not without energy and hope. 

And they are so damn smart and decent. 

They give me so much hope. 

Morrison and Chopin

27 July 2022: Finished up my entry on The Awakening today, so it's on my mind this evening, particularly Joyce Dyer's superb reading of the novel through the lens of Toni Morrison and Playing in the Dark. This passage, from the piece's final paragraph, sums it up pretty well: 

"In her novel and in her stories, Chopin knows there can be no freedom--in the South, anywhere in the nation, not in a single heart--without the recognition that black servitude in any form dare not remain. And there can be no artistic freedom without finding a way--perhaps encoded, nuanced, contradictory, hidden in the shadows of black Americans--to say this. The message is full of danger and the potential for sabotage, but it is vital to the identity of America's history and of American literature itself. The black presence is never on the edges of a text by white writers, because it lives powerfully at the center of the white imagination. The subject of the dream is the dreamer. This is the message Toni Morrison forces us to hear" (Dyer 152-153).

Work Cited

Dyer, Joyce. “Reading The Awakening with Toni Morrison.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 138–54. EBSCOhost.  

"Recitatif"

13 February 2020: “Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well.” --Toni Morrison, "Recitatif"

Getting ready to teach this story in American Ethnic Literature tomorrow and continue to be blown away by it, particularly the way Morrison gets us in the mind of an older narrator remembering her younger self. I've been thinking a bit about friendships from my youth this week, specifically about how my impressions of them and their meanings have changed over the years. This story leans right into that spot in my brain/heart. 

"This Amazing, Troubling Book"

3 November 2019: "The source of my unease reading this amazing, troubling book now seems clear; an imperfect coming to terms with three matters Twain addresses—Huck Finn’s estrangement, soleness and morbidity as an outcast child; the disproportionate sadness at the center of Jim’s and his relationship; and the secrecy in which Huck’s engagement with (rather than escape from) a racist society is necessarily conducted. It is also clear that the rewards if my effort to come to terms have been abundant. My alarm, aroused by Twain’s precise rendering of childhood’s fear of death and abandonment, remains--as it should. It has been extremely worthwhile slogging through Jim’s shame and humiliation to recognize the sadness, the tragic implications at the center of his relationship with Huck. My fury at the maze of deceit, the risk of personal harm that a white child is forced to negotiate in a race-inflected society, is dissipated by the exquisite uses to which Twain puts that maze, that risk." --Toni Morrison, on Huck Finn

I re-read this remarkable piece today, in preparation for class later this week. There is so much to admire here, from Morrison's impeccable close reading to the way she melds the personal and the academic and--what really stood out to me on this reading--her ability to find "rewards" in such a problematic and complicated novel. She is such a model for what it means to be an engaged, critical, charitable, and open reader.

Toni Morrison and Junot Diaz

25 January 2016: Stumbled across this interview (in podcast form) about a week ago. Just got around to listening to it on Monday. It's amazing; made cooking dinner a lot more pleasurable.