The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American

1
The Discovery of What It Means to Be an
American

• James Baldwin

2
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

3
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.

4
Teaching Contents

• 1)      Background Knowledge
• 2)      Exposition
• 3)      Detailed study of the Essay
• Organization Pattern
• Styles and Language Features
• 6)      Special Difficulties

5
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)

6
Background Knowledge

• 1) About the author, James Baldwin, and his major
  works
• lthttp//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jbaldwin.htmgt

7

• 2) Other Negro writers
• Richard Wright
• lthttp//www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writer
  s/dir/wright_richard/gt
• Ralph Allison
• 3) Expatriates

8
Exposition

• http//www.stanford.edu/arnetha/expowrite/info.ht
  ml

9
Detailed study of The Essay
10
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 peoples eyes, to be an American means
  to enjoy more freedom. Do you share their view?

11
Part One Para.1-9

• Mainly focus on what Baldwin, as an American
  Negro have found out in Europe.

12

• 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

13

• Why does the author leave America?

14

• 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

15

• Question What is the fury of the color
  problem? (Line2)
• It means the furious struggle brought by
  racial discrimination in America.

16
Para. 3-8

• The experience in Europe exerts a great impact
  on Baldwin. There He realized that

17

• 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.

18

• 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.

19

• 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?

20

• 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?

21
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.

22
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,

23

• 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,

24
Part Two Para.10-16

• The experience of staying in Europe helps
  Baldwin realize his own faults , his own identity
  and his own value.

25

• Para.10
• In Europe, Baldwin realized its the high
  time to get rid of some habits, because these
  habits make him unable to function effectively.

26

• 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

27

• Para.11
• The difference between Europe and America
  results in authors realization of his own
  identity and value

28

• 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

29

• 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 writers 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

30

• Simile
• It is as though he suddenly came out of a dark
  tunnel
• Comparing__________to___________.

31

• Question It was borne in on me and it did
  not make me feel melancholy What is the
  implied in this sentence?

32

• 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.

33
Part Three Para.17-22

• The perpetual contact with European people and
  gradual understanding of them shatters Baldwins
  preconceptions he had always taken for granted.

34

• 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 discrimination
• 2)  He catches a glimpse of the tense,
  intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus.
• Something cause him uneasy wonder
• 3) 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.

35

• 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.

36

• Draw a picture in circle to describe writer s
  realization of his identity and his
  responsibility

37

• 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?

38
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.

39

• 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?

40

• 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
• Hes always at odds with his father over
  politic

41

• 1) be given to sth/ to doing sth to do sth often
  or regularly
• Shes much give to outbursts of temper
• Hes given to going for long walks on his own

42

• 1)to wed withto combine two different things,
  ideas etc. successfully
• The music business weds art and commerce
• 2) compulsively ?????
• 3) intangible/ tangible

43
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

44
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.

45

• 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.

46

• 3) Rhetorical Devices
• metaphor
• simile
• transferred epithet
• http//www.megabrands.com/carroll/faq3.htmlto

47
Special Difficulties

• 1) Paraphrasing some sentences
• 2) Identifying figures of speech