1. What happens to a dream deferred? --from "Harlem," Langston Hughes
Much of what he have read incorporates dreams, both literal dreams and symbolic dreams as life aspirations. Look at two or three works (by "work" I mean a novel, a play, or a group of poems by a single author). Write on EITHER A OR B:
A. Describe any significant literal dreams in each work. How do these dreams figure in the work as a whole? How do they relate to any larger symbolic dream of the African American experience, be it freedom, hope, identity, or the like.
B. Describe several "dreams" -meaning aspirations, hopes, visions for the future. How do these dreams carry one or more themes through the works you've chosen to the end of the novels, poems, or plays?
2.They were laughing, Lena and she; collecting the roses, looking up at the man, and laughing from fear, embarrassment, and giddiness. -from Song of Solomon, Chapter 9, page 198, Toni Morrison
Laughter, as we have seen it in a number of our readings, is not simply a response to something humorous. It is the expression of something much more complicated-absurdity, grief, insanity, an attempt to get beyond one of these, to only name a few. Describe several significant occasions of laughter in two or three works. What is laughter to the character laughing in each of these cases? How does laughter figure in the work as a whole?
3. "What did I do to be so black and blue?" -Louis Armstrong
Many of the novels. Plays, and poems we have read incorporate the structures and feelings of blues and/or jazz music in their works. Choose at least three works in which blues feeling and structure figures in a major way. Then analyze some of the places in these works in which blues and/or jazz expressions are an important part of the whole work in terms of conveying to the reader some kind of meaning and feeling. Be sure to determine and decide on ONE particular thematic thread (such as African American experience, identity, love, freedom, care, and so on) to guide your thoughts and writing in a coherent essay.
4. "I've sometimes been overcome with a passion to return into that ‘heart of darkness' across the Mason-Dixon line, but then I remind myself that the darkness lies within my own mind."-from the "Epilogue" of Invisible Man Choose two or three characters and/or poets' own voices from two or three different literary works who discover the tension of freedom and identity between a community and the self described above. How does each character progress toward this discovery? Does he or she reach a new sense of self? If so, describe it; if not, what prevents him or her from doing so?