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)      Background Knowledge

2)      Exposition

3)      Detailed study of the Essay

4) Organization Pattern

5) Styles and Language Features

6)      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/ms-writers/dir/wright_richard/>

Ralph Allison

3) Expatriates

Exposition

http://www.stanford.edu/~arnetha/expowrite/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.9-

The 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 discrimination2)  He catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and

troubled face of Albert Camus.Something cause him uneasy wonder3) 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.htmlto

Special Difficulties

1) Paraphrasing some sentences

2) Identifying figures of speech