Lester Update

Wow. I'm so pissed for not doing this earlier, but I emailed Julius Lester today and he emailed me back!!! So now I need to find where I can insert the info that he gave me in the email. I'm so upset with myself for not thinking of emailing him like, two freaking months ago, but late's better than never.

lol I am smacking myself

Julius Lester, author of my primary text has a blog. right here on blogger. I just found out today. dammit.

Revision aka Pain

Ms. Bates,

Okay, so you told me to find other stories that people would find as ordinary and incorporate them, but I don't know what they are for. My current argument is that they further reiterate the fact that Lester encompasses many different types of narratives, but then that creates a structural problem because anywhere I think to put them stops the flow of my paper. I know I need to refocus a little, but when I bring Lester's stories in sooner, I end up cutting off the issues that my secondary sources bring up and I can't figure out where to slip them back in. Can I come by right after class today?

Dinner Party Update

So, I had another dinner party which was more like a dinner party. (I actually got my sources to speak to each other). Spindel, who talks about reconsidering slave narratives from a psychological perspective, fears that memory loss and distortion can invalidate slave narratives. Yetman, who explains the Federal Writers' Project (from where Lester discovered these narratives) and agrees that memory does affect the stories. Even more, he considers something else that Spindel does not, which is the possibility that ex-slaves being interviewed by white reporters could be more likely to sugar-coat the tellings of their experiences.
The question arises of what makes Lester's book any good if he is using these narratives and I say that because of their cultural value they fulfill the purpose of Lester's book, which is to provide a more thorough view of slavery. Foster says that the stories are pretty basic and all the same; slave wants to be free and tells story of how he gained freedom. I replay to her with Lester's story of Charley Williams.

Plagarism?

Okay, so I found a fact in secondary sources number one, then I came up with an explicit explanation for it. Later, I found a statement similar to my response in secondary source number two that noted the same fact, but did a better job of implying the reason. Should I credit secondary source number two forthe explicit explanation that I originally came up since the idea is there? Would it be plagarism if i didn't?

(Our Nig page 68 vs. Five Slave Narratives page xvii)

Dinner Party Exercise

Sorry some of it cut off. I did the best I could.

AAAH

Ms. Bates,
I think one of the problems that I'm having is trying to incorporate my secondary findings with the pattern that I found in TBS. I want to argue that all slave narratives must be taken with a grain of salt and explain why. At the same time I want to argue that the personal experience of a person cannot be undermined even if it can't be proven. BUT, the pattern that I found in TBS was slave narratives that were not the usual textbook version and I can't really figure out how to incorporate that into everything else. Do I need for everthing to fall under an argument for the pattern that I found, or can my pattern be a sub-argument?

Five Minutes of Fame

Big Claim: The young girl from this excerpt of To Be A Slave, though imprisoned by slavery, still maintains a desire to physically control her own body and the ability to maintain control over her own mind, and makes her own decisions, though unrecognized by anyone else, about her life.

The girl constantly displays her distrust toward Ellison.
“No, I don’t want you to buy me. I want to stay here.”
“No, you won’t have much to eat. What do you have to eat?”
The girl is worried more about her survival than her desires.
She prefers low risk stability rather than high risk reward, which is seen when Ellison tells her that she will eat better if she leaves with him.
As much as she wants to ride in the buggy, she runs away because she sees the buggy as a gilded trap to an unwanted life
The girl does what she wants to do, regardless of what the rules are or what others tell her.
She runs away when she finds out that Ellison had bought her because she doesn’t want to leave.
She gets in the back of the buggy where she wants to ride even though Ellison had told her to come back to the front.

Works Cited for two articles

Spindel, Donna J. "Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered." Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 27, No. 2. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 247-261

Byerman, Keith E. "Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery ." Journal of American History, Dec 2005, Vol. 92 Issue 3, p1071-1072