The Discovery of What It
Means to Be an American
James Baldwin
Aims:
1) Improving students’ ability to read
between lines and understand the text
properly;
2) Cultivating students’ ability to make
a creative reading;
3) Enhancing students’ ability to
appreciate the text from different
perspectives
Aims:
4) Helping students to understand some
difficult words and expressions;
5) Helping students to understanding
rhetorical devices;
6) Encouraging students to voice their own
viewpoint fluently and accurately.
Teaching Contents:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Background Knowledge
Exposition
Detailed study of the Essay
Organization Pattern
Styles and Language Features
Special Difficulties
Time Allocation:
1) Background knowledge (15 min.)
2) Detailed study of the text (180 min.)
3) Structure analysis (15 min.)
4) Language appreciation (15 min.)
5) Free talk (30 min)
Background Knowledge
1) About the author, James Baldwin, and his
major works
<http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jbaldwin.htm>
2) Other Negro writers:
Richard Wright:
<http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/mswriters/dir/wright_richard/>
Ralph Allison
3) Expatriates
Exposition
http://www.stanford.edu/~arnetha/expowrit
e/info.html
Detailed study of The Essay
Pre-reading Question:
1) In what way does this title impress you?
Have you ever thought of what is means to
be A Chinese?
2) In some people’s eyes, to be an American
means to enjoy more freedom. Do you share
their view?
Part One: Para.1-9
Mainly focus on what Baldwin, as an
American Negro have found out in
Europe.
1) Beginning with the quotation of famous
American writer Henry James lends
authority and force to what one intends to
say
2) In Europe, the author makes an principal
discovery of how complex the fate to be
American
Why does the author leave America?
1) afraid of being unable to live through all the
furious struggle brought by racial discrimination
in America;
2) wanted to prevent himself from becoming merely
a Negro; or even, merely a Negro writer.
3) wants to find out in what way he could make use
of his special experience to bring him closer to
other people instead of driving him farther apart
from them;
Question: What is the “fury of the color
problem”? (Line2)
It means the furious struggle brought by
racial discrimination in America.
Para. 3-8:
The experience in Europe exerts a great
impact on Baldwin. There He realized that:
1) He was a very patriotic American. All the
other American writers in Paris also shared
this patriotic feeling.
2) Americans, both white and black, were all
trying to find their own special
individualities.
3)The fact of Europe was part of their identity
and part of their inheritance.
4)He had accepted his American Negro status
without feeling ashamed and no longer
hated America.
Question: What does the writer mean
when he says he found himself to be as
American as any Texas G. I.? Why was
he astonished at this?
Question: Why did the writer go to
Switzerland? How did Bessie Smith help
him?
Question: “I had been in Paris a couple of
years before any of this became clear to me.”
What does the word “this” refer to?
Para.9The author discovers his specific identity
which encourages him to fight in the
dangerous and unending struggle whose
outcome one cannot yet foresee.
Figure of speech: Metaphor
1)
“… When it did, I like many a writer
before me upon the discovery that his props
have all been knocked out from under
him, …”
2)
“… and, anyway, a writer, when he has
made his first breakthrough, has simply won
a crucial skirmish in a dangerous, unending
and unpredictable battle still, …”
Part Two : Para.10-16
The experience of staying in Europe
helps Baldwin realize his own faults ,
his own identity and his own value.
Para.10
In Europe, Baldwin realized it’s the high
time to get rid of some habits, because
these habits make him unable to function
effectively.
A sense of relief from:
1) Finding reason or excuses to explain why
he is a writer;
2) Displaying his strength to defend himself
or to avoid be attacked;
3) Trying to prove he is an ordinary person;
Para.11
The difference between Europe and
America results in author’s realization of
his own identity and value
Europe:
1) European society has always been divided into
classes.
2) European writer is a part of an old honorable
tradition — of intellectual activity
3) European society is more stable and everyone
there has a fixed status
4) There is a freer and more genuinely friendly
relationship in Europe
America:
1) American people have a very deep-rooted distrust
of real intellectual effort and they cling
desperately to that myth of America;
2) American writer’s status is lowest in American
society.
3) American society is more mobile but no one has
fixed status or no one knows what his status is.
4) Social paranoia
Simile
“…It is as though he suddenly came out
of a dark tunnel…”
Comparing__________to___________.
Question : “… It was borne in on me — and it
did not make me feel melancholy …” What
is the implied in this sentence?
The shortness of his own life did not
make Baldwin feel melancholy. No
matter how long he stays in this world,
he will make best use of his brief
opportunity
to
implement
his
responsibility as an American Negro
writer.
Part Three: Para.17-22
The perpetual contact with European
people and gradual understanding of
them shatters Baldwin’s preconceptions
he had always taken for granted.
The crucial day may be :
1) An Algerian taxi-driver tells him how it feels to
be an Algerian in Paris.
There also exists racial discrimination
2) He catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and
troubled face of Albert Camus.
Something cause him uneasy wonder
3) Some one asks him to explain Little Rock and he
begins to feel that it would be simpler…
The fight and struggle for racial discrimination
exits everywhere in the world.
He realizes: ?
1) His entire sojourn has been tending to this
personal day, terrible day.
2) There are no untroubled countries in this
fearfully troubled world.
3) The freedom that the American writer finds
in Europe brings him, full circle, back to
himself and his responsibility for his
development is in his hands.
Draw a picture in circle to describe writer ’s
realization of his identity and his
responsibility
Questions
1)What is the paradox mentioned in Para. 13?
How does the writer explain this paradox?
2) What does the writer say about “ social
status” in Europe and America?
3) How does he discover “what it means to be
an American?”
Part Four: Para.23-29
Baldwin realized that his responsibility is
to find out the hidden laws to govern the
American society and unite the vision of
Europe and that of America together.
Questions
1) Why did the author mention Tolstoy and
Anna Karenina?
2) What does the word “ Symptom” indicate?
(Para.26; Line 5)
3) In what way does Europe help the
American writer?
1) at odds with
at odds with sth: to be different from
something, when the two things should be
the same
These findings are at odds with what is going
on in the rest of the country
at odds with sb: to disagree with sb
He’s always at odds with his father over
politic
1) be given to sth/ to doing sth: to do sth often
or regularly;
She’s much give to outbursts of temper
He’s given to going for long walks on his own
1)to wed … with…to combine two different
things, ideas etc. successfully;
The music business weds art and commerce
2) compulsively: 情不自禁地
3) intangible/ tangible
4. Organization Pattern
1) Type of literature: a piece of expository
writing
2) Some methods of developing ideas:
a point by point analogy
simultaneous comparison
alternating comparison
Styles and Language Features
1) Writing with both strength and delicacy,
Baldwin has made the essay into a form
that brings together vivid reporting,
personal recollection and speculative
thought.
2) One great merit of his essays is their
honesty in reflecting his own doubts and
aggressions, and in recording his
torturous efforts to find some peace in
the relations between James Baldwin the
lonely writer and James Baldwin the man
who suffers as a Negro.
3) Rhetorical Devices
metaphor
simile
transferred epithet
http://www.megabrands.com/carroll/faq3.h
tmlto
Special Difficulties
1) Paraphrasing some sentences
2) Identifying figures of speech