For Thursday, you’ll want to read W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” – – the first chapter of his incredible 1903 volume, The Souls of Black Folk. As you read, make three digital annotations.
This time around, use your annotations to keep track of the motifs that Du Bois deploys in his chapter. What is a motif? A motif is a textual element – – image, setting, style, figure (like metaphor or simile) etc. – – that is repeated in a text, each repetition accumulating new meanings and associations. Motifs can often form patterns within a text. Some of the most notable motifs in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” might include: doubling, “the veil,” walls, sight, sound, etc. If you can, try to keep track – – through your annotations – – of one motif you discover in Du Bois’s text.
In our somewhat hurried discussion of Adams in Tuesday’s zoom session, I tried to focus on a couple of major ideas in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” including irony, consciousness, knowledge/education, and the conflict between form and feeling (or sentiment and force, taste and energy, appearance and reality, object and subject). I’ve collected a few examples of this conflict or tension between reality and consciousness in Adams here. (To me, these oppositions can be related to a pretty classical debate about the sublime and the beautiful, most pithily summed up by the Romantic-era, English critic Edmund Burke.) In any case, I think we can see that as U.S. literature enters the modern age, the gap or tension between world/reality and consciousness becomes a central concern and problem. (Notice how “class consciousness” as a tension between form (i.e. the oppression of “finger-bowls”) and authenticity (Martin’s “chafed” neck, for instance) is represented in Jack London’s 1909 novel – – Martin Eden.) Keep your eye on this problem/situation as we travel through the syllabus, especially perhaps as you read Du Bois, for whom consciousness becomes a crucial term missing from debates about race and power in the U.S.