1. + Reading a difficult text How to get the most out of your reading

2. + What problems do you encounter when reading a “difficult” text?

3. + 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

4. + 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?

5. + Problem: I read it, but I don’t understand it! Don’t just highlight and underline; write margin notes. Explain WHY you have underlined. Sum up each paragraph in this way: What it says What it does For instance in literary texts: 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... 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) What it does: Sets out the argument

6. + Problem: I read it, but I don’t understand it! When reading critical texts: find the extract it refers to in the novel/poem. Underline the relevant words and make margin notes. Sum-up what you have read in your own words (in writing) Teach what you have learned to someone else 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? Apply what you have learned in your own writing

7. + Problem: The sentences are too long and complicated Read them aloud Rewrite them in your own words

8. + Beloved p 234 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.

9. + 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.’

10. + 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.

11. + Home Learning by 12/14 th January 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. Fill in the grid Extension reading: Dracula: The Conquest of the West and Anti-Semitism p77-89 Assertive Women and Gay Men: Gender Studies and Dracula p123-135 Beloved: My Girl Come Home: Reading Beloved