ENG 6283: Narrative Theory

CN: historical trauma . . . . descriptions of conditions on trans-Atlantic slave trading ships I know it's not an original reference by any means. I know everyone has had to read this book at some point in their post-high school academic lives if their universities had any humanities requirement. I know it's super basic to mention it, but this passage from this book so perfectly fits the prompt and reminds me so much of our readings that I have to mention it. Of course, I'm thinking of the trans-Atlantic slave trading ship passage from the great Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved.  When I first read Beloved, this passage struck me and totally disoriented me. I had no idea what was going on. I had to read and re-read it several times before I felt somewhat confident that I knew what I was reading and what it meant. However, it wasn't until I read the readings for this week that I understood how it fit into the rest of the novel. I have only read the

I have no calling in a world where we all wonder what we're meant to do, who we're supposed to be. My mom called me the other day to tell me one of my childhood friends would be moving to my hometown soon because her husband had accepted a job with the Baptist church next door to her Methodist church. I don’t know why she thinks I give a shit about small town gossip or any news that concerns the church seeing as how she’s very aware of how I feel about organized religion. Nevertheless, she has nothing else to tell me because her world is much smaller than mine. “He used to be an airplane pilot,” she says. “Then why is he going to be a youth minister? How will they survive? Where will the money come from?” I ask, appalled. I know from my instagram that his wife is a stay-at-home mom of three. “It doesn’t matter, they’ll figure it out,” she brushes it off. “He has a calling to work for the Lord.” A calling. A goddamn calling. Half of my life, I waited for some fucking ca

I f you watched a horror movie prior to the 1990s you were likely going to be faced with a beautiful, perky, blonde white woman who was going to have the worst time ever, and end up with a whole lot of PTSD, if she survived at all. From the Hitchcock Blonde of the 1950s and 1960s to the busty cheerleader of the 1970s and 1980s, the archetype was everywhere, and she always ended badly. And then, in the 1990s, the narrative that we thought we all knew, that we were so familiar with, was turned on its head, and we were introduced to something completely different. She was still blonde, and perky, and a cheerleader, but she also kicked so much supernatural ass that she became a cultural icon in her own right. When Joss Whedon created Buffy the Vampire Slayer his intention was to allow that silly, blonde cheerleader to take back the power that had been taken from her over decades of horror movies. He created a character who was small and athletic, not stupid but not the sharpest to

“Everyone I knew was dead, dying, or caring for someone who was dying. Our friends died, we made new friends, they died, we made new friends, and they died, and it just went on and on.”  - AIDS Activist Cleve Jones There's this idea that queer folx don't experience time the same way as straight, cis people. In her article " Queer Time: The Alternative to 'Adulting, '"queer novelist and scholar Sarah Jaffe suggested that "Queer lives follow their own temporal logic." As a queer person, I'd have to agree. We've never been given the opportunity to live time like the majority.  How could we when we had to spend so much time sewing quilt squares because we weren't allowed to have funerals? We spent so much time stitching and stitching and stitching our friends' names, our lovers' names, our colleagues' names, and even our own names' into pieces of fabrics.  In 1985, queer activist Cleve Jones came up with

When  I first read the 1831 text,  The Life of Omar Ibn Said, Written by Himself , I read it in translation, because this autobiographical “slave narrative” was inscribed in Arabic. I put “slave narrative” in quotation marks because Omar’s story is nothing like one of (if not  the ) most famous American slave narratives— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself.  That 1845 story is told in English.  It lays out the narrative of a former slave who learned to read, escaped to the north, and became a free man. That’s not Omar’s story. Nor is his narrative well-framed from beginning to end, from birth to freedom, as Douglass’s is. Omar begins with a long, mysterious musing about God’s mercy and power, then addresses his audience, a man named Hunter: “Do not be hard upon me, Brother. … You asked me to write my life. I am not able to do this because I have much forgotten my own, as well as the Arabic language.” Then Omar begins a more prop

The charming gentleman in this photo is my host father, Mr. Watari (Otou-san, preferably). He is the cheesiest and kindest person on the planet. He cherishes his wife and two daughters, and in his spare time he tends to his garden on a mountain three hours outside of Hiroshima. His preferred drink is beer, and he has a new fascination for TexJoy. Despite his quirks, Mr. Watari is extremely insecure with his English conversational skills. So much so, that for the first two days he and I essentially played charades--my slapshod Japanese would give him leeway, but then his "broken English" (his words) would take away that slack and we'd be back at square one, motioning to each other that we each wanted a napkin. The prompt this week made me think about him—specifically the grand narrative that Japanese cannot “master” the English language in a short amount of time. Language acquisition is a rigorous process, and our studies of how narratives are constructed and sp