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Reading a difficult text
How to get the most out of your reading
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What problems do you encounter
when reading a “difficult” text?
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Problem: Difficult words
Problem: The sentences are too
long and complicated
Problem: I can read it, but I don’t
understand it!
Problem: I don’t know why I am
being asked to read it
Problem: I read the text, think I
understand it, but I don’t know how
to use it in my writing
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Problem: Difficult words
Use a dictionary! Learn the words!
Use them!
Problem: I don’t know why I am
being asked to read it
Find out! Ask yourself: what will I do
with the knowledge I will gain from
this text?
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Problem: I read it, but I don’t
understand it!
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Don’t just highlight and underline; write margin notes. Explain WHY you
have underlined.
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Sum up each paragraph in this way:
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What it says
What it does
For instance in literary texts:
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What it says: This paragraph describes Harker’s journey to the castle. Wolves, blue
lights, battlements. Mix of simple/complex sentences
What it does: Creates suspense/horror.
And in critical texts . . .
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What it says: One of the key themes in Beloved is the dehumanisation of slaves
(Reconstruction, emancipation, comparing slaves to beasts, Sethe is not a beast
(she has two legs not 4)
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What it does: Sets out the argument
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Problem: I read it, but I don’t
understand it!
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When reading critical texts: find the extract it refers to in the
novel/poem. Underline the relevant words and make margin
notes.
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Sum-up what you have read in your own words (in writing)
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Teach what you have learned to someone else
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Type up a list of key quotes from what you have read. Think
about how they might apply to the text you are studying. Ask
questions of it: do you agree with what it says? Which section of
Dracula/Beloved could you apply this to? Can you find an
analogy that will help you understand the concept being
expressed?
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Apply what you have learned in your own writing
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Problem: The sentences are too
long and complicated
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Read them aloud
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Rewrite them in your own words
Beloved
p
234
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Read this passage which comes at the end of Part 2, Section 1. Talk about what ideas about
slavery Morrison is trying to develop.
The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he
believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the
black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of,
including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the
doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to
having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You
needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark
skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red
gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more
coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever
and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something
Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew
inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable)
place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after
life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed
and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were
they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the
red gums were their own.
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The critic Linden Peach has said of this examination of slavery:
‘One of the most damning weapons of white, colonial power
structures was the representation and stigmatising of Africans
and African-Americans as beasts. This is a stereotype which
Beloved specifically inverts whilst exposing it as the product of
white cultural hegemony.
The passage begins with an account of how whites have seen
blacks which subtly encapsulates the narratives which have
underpinned these views. These include the discovery and
exploitation of foreign countries; the inability to appreciate the
otherness of other cultures; and the fear of these cultures which
caused whites to construct a blackness that said more about
their concept of whiteness than the other races. Then these
narratives are inverted. The constructions imposed by whites
on black people are said to have compacted on themselves
and in the potted narrative that follows we see how white
ethnocentricity contains the seeds of its own destruction.’
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Talk about all the ways in which Toni Morrison deals with this
idea of the representation of African-Americans as ‘beasts’ in
the rest of the novel. You will need to think about her imagery
and symbolism as well as the representation of the black
characters and the white characters in the novel.
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Home Learning by 12/14th January
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Read the Extracts from York’s Notes on themes (Beloved and
Dracula), the extracts from critical analysis on Dracula, Eva
Lennox Birch: Black American Women’s Writing: A Quilt of Many
Colours; The interview with Toni Morrison and The Story of
Margaret Garner using the system you have just learned.
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Fill in the grid
Extension reading:
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Dracula: The Conquest of the West and Anti-Semitism p77-89
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Assertive Women and Gay Men: Gender Studies and Dracula
p123-135
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Beloved: My Girl Come Home: Reading Beloved