Prose texts which complement your poetry text for A level coursework.

YEAR 13 2019-20

Task 2: Post 1900 Prose and Poetry Comparison 13D Coursework Mr Brewer

In the autumn term of Year 13, for your second and final coursework piece you will need to compare a poetry text with a prose text (a novel, or collection of short stories). In class, you will be studying a collection of poetry from And Still I Rise by (1978) and have been given some preparation work for this before you leave for the summer holidays.

You are expected to choose the prose text you would like to compare with Maya Angelou’s poetry and therefore over the summer you should have been thinking about and reading texts which complement Angelou’s themes and ideas in her poems.

The following list of texts are suggestions of novels which will work well alongside the poetry text you study next year. Make sure you read around the thumbnail summaries for each novel and then get your hands on a copy and start reading. You must read at least one of these but many of you will want to read several before you choose which text you like best.

By the end of the term, you will need to prove (by having a copy of your chosen book(s) and through discussion with your teacher) that you are reading widely and taking onboard a new challenge in your reading journey.

Good luck and enjoy the next step of your reading journey!

PART I: POST 1900 POETRY ANTHOLOGY

Maya Angelou - And Still I Rise (1978) – collection of poems to be treated as a ‘text’.

 A Kind of Love  Some Say  Country Lover  Remembrance (for Paul)  Where We Belong, a Duet  Phenomenal Woman; Men; Refusal  Just for a Time  Junkie Monkey Reel  The Lesson  California Prodigal  My Arkansas  Through the Inner City to the Suburbs  Lady Luncheon Club  Momma Welfare Roll  The Singer Will Not Sing  Willie  To Beat the child was bad enough  Woman Work  Still I Rise  The Caged Bird

PART II: POST 1900 PROSE SELECTION

You will choose one of the following approved texts and compare this to the poetry anthology:

RELATIONSHIPS TO HOMELAND – a text that explores the complexity of the relationship between self and homeland (including, for example, emotional pain, nostalgia, exile, and the experience of ‘returning’- whether revisiting through memory and/or literally).

Colm Toibin Khaled Hosseini Brooklyn (2009) A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America -- to against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years—from the Soviet live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding—that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic charismatic sister behind. sweep of war, where personal lives—the struggle to survive, raise a family, find Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when happiness—are inextricable from the history playing out around them. she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future. friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love—a stunning accomplishment

Sebastian Barry Anne Enright

A Long Long Way (2005) The Green Road (2015)

Praised as a “master storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use From internationally acclaimed author Anne Enright of language” (Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided Ireland's Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of loyalties and the realities of war.In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely family and fracture, compassion and selfishness—a book about the gaps in eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he the human heart and how we strive to fill them. Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together Germans on the Western Front. Once there, he encounters a horror or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave of violence and gore he could not have imagined and sustains his the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the side. Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the Ireland in his absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and ravaged by forces closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds and sold. with his family, he knows he must rejoin his regiment and fight until A profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the end. With grace and power, Sebastian Barry vividly renders the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Willie’s personal struggle as well as the overwhelming consequences Road is Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to of war. date. UNCERTAIN IDENTITY – a text which deals with the struggle for identity: social and cultural conformity; history, memory and past experiences; competing senses of self; and finding your place in the world.

Andrea Levy Toni Morrison Small Island (2004) Beloved (1987)

Small Island is an international bestseller. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Orange Prize for Fiction: Best of the Best, The Whitbread Novel Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of Award, The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and the Commonwealth slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a Writers' Prize. It has now been adapted for the screen as a coproduction of story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. the BBC and Masterpiece/WGBH Boston. Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status years later she is still not free. She has too many memories as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve. engraved with a single word: Beloved. Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a insurmountable barriers---in short, an encapsulation of that most American rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize of experiences: the immigrant's life. laureate Toni Morrison.

Zora Neale Hurston Zadie Smith Their Eyes Were Watching God On Beauty (2006) (1937)

Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie Crawford, whose life is a quest to find true love. Janie Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like narrates the story of her three marriages and her search for Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at love to her friend Phoeby. Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she When Janie is young, her grandmother sets her up with a man named Logan once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests Killicks, who becomes Janie's first husband. Logan treats Janie like a child and after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, expects her to meekly obey him. But Janie is strong willed and refuses. When and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the Logan threatens to kill Janie, she runs away with Joe Starks, a handsome and oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his charming man. life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore. Joe and Janie move to Eatonville, Florida, which was the first all-black town in America, and the place where Zora Neale Hurston spent most of her childhood. Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the Janie thinks that she might be happy for the first time. But Joe, like Logan, has right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown very rigid definitions of gender roles and expects Janie to support him and not together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war argue with him. Janie is too outspoken for this, and she and Joe have a rocky against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a relationship. Joe eventually dies, leaving Janie independent. death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you After Joe dies, Janie falls in love with a man named Tea Cake. They get married choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you and move to the everglades of Florida. Janie finally has the love that she has love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, longed for, and she and Tea Cake are happy, despite the fact that they're both and how far will you go to get it? occasionally jealous of each other. When a hurricane hits, though, things take a darker turn. A rabid dog attacks Janie, and when he tries to save her, Tea Cake Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis gets bitten by the dog and contracts rabies. As a result, he begins to go mad, and of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and he eventually tries to shoot Janie. She kills him in self-defense and is put on trial political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might for murder. expect, very funny indeed. VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION- a text that considers (female) resilience in the face of (sexual/ racial/ religious) violence, abuse and oppression.

Toni Morrison Alice Walker

The Colour Purple (1982) The Bluest Eye (1970)

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first Set in the deep American South between the wars, it is novel, a book heralded for its richness of the tale of Celie, a young black girl born into poverty and segregation. language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood Raped repeatedly by the man she calls 'father', she has two children taken hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven- away from her, is separated from her beloved sister Nettie and is trapped year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue into an ugly marriage. But then she meets the glamorous Shug Avery, so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue- singer and magic-maker - a woman who has taken charge of her own eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the destiny. Gradually, Celie discovers the power and joy of her own spirit, marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life freeing her from her past and reuniting her with those she loves. does change- in painful, devastating ways. The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, making

Walker the first black woman to win the prize. Walker also won What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983.Mel Watkins of the New a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest York Times Book Review wrote that it is a "striking and consummately Eye remains one of Tony Morrisons's most powerful, well-written novel", praising its powerful emotional impact and unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction. epistolary structure

Roddy Doyle John McGahern

That They May Face the The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) Rising Sun (2002)

Widely considered to be the finest Irish writer of fiction at work today, John McGahern gives us a new novel that, This is the heart-rending story of a with insight, humor, and deep sympathy, brings to vivid woman struggling to reclaim her life the world and the people of a contemporary Irish village. dignity after a violent, abusive marriage and a worsening It is a village flirting with the more sophisticated trappings of modernity but steeped in the traditions of its unforgettable inhabitants and their lives. There are drink problem. Paula Spencer is a thirty-nine-year-old the Ruttledges, who came from London in search of a different life on the edge woman who is struggling to reclaim her dignity after of the village lake; John Quinn, who will stop at nothing to ensure a flow of marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening women through his life; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, head of the local IRA as well as drinking problem. She recalls her contented childhood, town auctioneer and undertaker; the gentle Jamesie and his wife, Mary, who the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration have never left the lake and who know about everything that ever stirred or moved there; Patrick Ryan, the builder who never quite finishes what he starts; of her romance with Charlo, and the marriage to him that Bill Evans, the farmhand whose orphaned childhood was marked with state- left her powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and sanctioned cruelties and whose adulthood is marked by the scars; and the her strength, Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and wealthiest man in town, known as the Shah. unforgettable. A year in the lives of these and other characters unfolds through the richly observed rituals of work and play, of religious observance and annual festivals, and the details of the changing seasons, of the cycles of birth and death. With deceptive simplicity and eloquence, the author reveals the fundamental workings of human nature as it encounters the extraordinary trials and pleasures, terrors and beauty, of ordinary life. DISILLUSIONMENT - a text which offers an account of the disappointments, anxieties and fears born out of life’s failure (and our own individual failure) to live up to our expectations, and possible responses to this situation

Richard Yates J.M. Coetzee

Revolutionary Road (1961) Disgrace (1999)

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of April Wheeler, a bright young couple who are bored by the David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. The professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a inability to feel fulfilled or happy in their relationships or comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He careers. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his Yates shows how Frank and April's decision to change their position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his lives for the better leads to betrayal and tragedy. Yates's classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his incisive, moving and often very funny prose weaves a tale that attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces anticipation of the way we live now. Like F Scott Fitzgerald's one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced. the poverty at the soul of many wealthy Americans and the cost of chasing the American Dream.

OTHER THEMES CONTAINED IN THE BOOKLIST ABOVE:

BEREAVEMENT AND THE PAST – a text that explores grief as a form of imprisonment to be overcome through personal reawakening.

 Anne Enright – The Gathering (2007)  Colm Tóibín – Nora Webster (2014)

TIME: RITUAL, REPETITION, ‘EVENT’, MEMORY – a text that explores the rhythms of everyday life and the moments and events that punctuate it (exploring the wider social and cultural world of the text through portraits of individual lived experiences; the interplay between past present and future; the relationship between remembering and forgetting).

 Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)  John McGahern – That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002)

LONELINESS AND ISOLATION - a text that explores the experience of feeling emotionally isolated

 Richard Yates- Revolutionary Road (1961)  Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)  Roddy Doyle – The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996)  J.M Coetzee – Disgrace (1999)  Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn (2009)  Anne Enright - The Green Road (2015) OTHER POSSIBLE THEMATIC AREAS FOR YOUR COMPARISON (NEVER EXHAUSTIVE…)

REMEMBERANCE, HAPPINESS AND REMAINS – as a text that explores how and what we remember, the choices we make in life, our need for routine and repetition, what happiness can consist in, and what will remain of us when we are gone.

LOVE – as a text which considers the complex dynamics of relationships and love

FAMILY – as a text that explores the family dynamics of parent/ child/ sibling relationships: loyalty, trust and betrayal; neglect and abuse; guilt and duty; love, inner-strength and self-sacrifice; coming to terms with the past; compromise and realignment.

GENDER AND POWER– as a text that explores changes in relationships between men and women.

SEXUALITY GUILT

GENDER STEREOTYPES LOST INNOCENCE

CHILDHOOD AND MEMORY INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

PART III: THE COMPARATIVE COURSEWORK TASK

Post-1900 coursework has to cover all three genres and one post 2000 text – we have looked at post 2000 drama for task 1 so task 2 involves a comparison between prose and poetry.

I will be teaching a selection of 16 poems from African writer Maya Angelou’s poetry collection And Still I Rise. I will then will teach the poetry in term 1 of Year 13 but we will use the final term of Year 12 to prepare you by ensuring you have all read and comprehensively understood at least one prose text from a selected list of novels above. Any prose texts must allow for meaningful comparison with the poetry ‘text’ but the list should be wide enough to allow you to work independently. Students who are already very independent readers with highly developed analytical skills will be allowed to choose their own poetry and prose texts but this must be agreed well in advance with the teacher.

All texts to be used and proposed questions must be submitted to OCR via the electronic task approval form and will need approval before you start to write but this does not need to be done until after you have had the chance to construct you own question yourself.

Basic ‘need to know’:

 All Assessment Objectives are equally weighted for this task.  All texts chosen MUST be post 1900 and cannot include any of the A level texts from the OCR syllabus.  Translated texts are also not allowed.

Above all enjoy this coursework task: it is the first real opportunity for you to show real autonomy! OCR English Literature A Level Component 3: Comparative Essay

Contextual Information Booklet

Base text: Maya Angelou- poems from ‘And Still I Rise’ (1978)

Marguerite Annie Johnson, Ritie, Baby, “My sister”- Maya, Rita Johnson, Dr Maya Angelou Contents

Section 1 Quotes

Section 2 Biographical and Cultural Context

Section 3 Reading and Viewing

Section 4 Two suggested methods for setting up your comparison

Section 5 Analysing the poems in 'And Still I Rise'

Section 6 The poems

Section 7 Basic critical introductions

Section 1 QUOTES

“I decided many years ago to invent myself. I had obviously been invented by someone else – by a whole society – and I didn't like their invention.”

(Maya Angelou)

“Angelou shows us in her poetry that life is a richly patterned mosaic.”

“A redwood tree, with deep deep roots in American culture,” Maya Angelou gives people the

freedom to think about their history in a way they never had before.

'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real

original. There's no duplicate. There is no duplicate'

(Toni Morrison)

'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman'

(President Barack Obama)

'The poems and stories she wrote . . . were gifts of wisdom and wit, courage and grace' (President )

'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds'

(Oprah Winfrey)

Section 2 Biographical and Cultural Context

@ You are going to write two research essays, one for Maya

Angelou and another for your novelist. Each essay should be between 1,500 and 2,000 words. Use Sections 2 and 3 to inform your research essay on Maya Angelou. Here is your title:

Discuss the life and works of Maya Angelou. You should pay particular attention to her style, including the ways in which she negotiates and manipulates genre, as well as personal and universal and/or political meanings you discern in her writing.

Biography in Brief

Maya Angelou is an African-American writer and activist. Born 4 April 1928, she lived and chronicled an extraordinary life: rising from poverty, violence and racism, she became a renowned author, poet, playwright, civil rights' activist - working with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King - and memoirist. She wrote and performed a poem, '', for President Clinton on his inauguration; she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and was honoured by more than seventy universities throughout the world.

She first became known to the world when her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969. This was followed by six volumes of autobiography, the seventh and final volume, Mom & Me & Mom, published in 2013. She wrote three collections of essays; many volumes of poetry, including His Day is Done, a tribute to Nelson Mandela; and two cookbooks. She had a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University of North Carolina. Dr Angelou died on 28 May 2014.

For a much more in depth look at Maya Angelou's life please refer to the reading booklet with extracts from Linda Wagner-Martin's book Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit (2016) Section 3 Reading and Viewing

There is so much material out there relating to Maya Angelou. Over the course of the next few weeks, you should immerse yourselves in her life and works, and in the time periods Angelou's poetry collection 'And Still I Rise' covers and was written (1930s-1970s America). Here is some suggested reading and viewing to get you started!

3.1 READING

Maya Angelou's autobiographies: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Getting Merry Like Christmas (1976), (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002).

Maya Angelou's poetry collections, including the poetry collection 'And Still I Rise' (1978)

http://blackbirdlibrary.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/64614716/Maya%20Angelou%20Shaker% 20Criticism_Excerpt.pdf (you can download this and save it to your user area)

Essay Review: "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest Until It's Done": Two Dauntless Women of the Civil Rights Movement and the Education of a People Harvard Education Review (William Ayers, 1989)http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/haer.59.4.f737856762936205 Vol 59, Issue 4

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nBsaFf4qzRQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=maya+angelou+a nd+still+I+rise+essay&ots=JadUDaVcJV&sig=bms8_hdce7awtuLn4-DYM7NkQJ0#v=onepage&q&f=false (Mary Jane Lupton)

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5G1U- b2q0bsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA91&dq=maya+angelou+and+still+I+rise+essay&ots=zY_F_L4- SE&sig=h4W_8A7BBLQwTB_XTIAvDKYN0gY#v=onepage&q=maya%20angelou%20and%20still%20I%20ri se%20essay&f=false (Harold Bloom)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conversations-Maya-Angelou- Literary/dp/087805362X/ref=sr_1_34?ie=UTF8&qid=1468250983&sr=8- 34&keywords=criticism+maya+angelou (coversations with Angelou- look inside content)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Maya-Angelou-Linda-Wagner- Martin/dp/1501307843/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468253549&sr=8-1&keywords=linda+maya+angelou (Adventurous Spirit, look inside- published 2015)

3.2 VIEWING

How to Make an American Quilt (1995)- film starring Maya Angelou alongside Jean Simmons, Winona Ryder and other iconic female actresses.

http://mayaangeloufilm.com/ and http://www.sundance.org/projects/maya-angelou-and-still-i-rise (Website for new film due for release June 2016 entitled 'Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise'. Watch a clip on this website)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76woOvo641E (Interview with the directors, 19 mins) http://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/morning-becomes-eclectic/maya-angelou-and-still-i-rise (Radio interview with directors of the film at the Sundance Film Festival, January 2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy5Htf6ubDk (Maya Angelou Interview for 'The Great Depression'- 50 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhRlCY0_JNg&list=PLCC_AldZHr4JxAezEzV6JJI3F-aWFT- FF&index=6 (Live and unplugged recording from 1996- Lewisham, London, including Angelou rapping and singing her poetry- 37 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHTpGfPe1c (Angelou in conversation with the director of the National Museum of African Art, 2014, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery- 53 mins be patient with the start...the interesting content on Angelou begins when the artist starts to speak about her about 14 mins into this recording).

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2007/10/16/millernangelou (Interview with Maya Angelou- 30 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbecKv2xR14&list=PLCC_AldZHr4JxAezEzV6JJI3F-aWFT- FF (Angelou on 'love')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT2Ie2UZQig (Interview with Charlie Rose, 1992, 1 hour).

Watch a selection of these interviews from Washington University Archive, including the interview with Maya Angelou herself: https://www.youtube.com/user/wufilmarchives/videos

Section 4 Two suggested methods for setting up your comparison

1) Some of you will be building a comparison around two texts that explore experiences that have emerged from the same cultural traditions, geographical place, and even time period. For example, if you have chosen The Colour Purple, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, or Invisible Man, your novel and Angelou's poems will have a history of African American experience in common.

For example, both Angelou's poems and your novel deal with experiences of discrimination and subjugation, or issues of African-American (female) identity.

You should compare and contrast the poems and your novel in terms of their form and structure (consider individual poems but also the 3 part structure that makes up the collection as a whole); their language, tone and style; their values and messages. This will be provide you with a good starting point from which to construct your question focus.

2) Others of you will be building a comparison around experiences from across two different cultures. The focus could be something like relationships to memory and the past; issues of belonging, and what it is to be an outsider; experiences of subjugation and discrimination.

For example, writers from across different cultures and traditions often explore way in which the past haunts individuals and societies. Memory is often dealt with in interesting ways- as a symbol of imprisonment but also as an essential means of liberation and self-realisation.

Look at this introduction to a comparative essay that focuses on two novels from two different cultural traditions. It is about the impact and importance of memory on individuals and societies:

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” says Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922. Joyce was a significant figure in Morrison's own literary education, and she makes reference to him in her own focus on black regional life. While his hero is dogged by an Irish history that shapes his identity and to which he finds himself continually returning, so Morrison's characters are haunted by a history of African-American experience that they find impossible to shake off. In Beloved, the history of slavery manifests itself both through characters' personal memories of specific incidents in their past and, more powerfully perhaps, through a collective memory of inhumanity and persecution that follows them relentlessly and from which they can never escape.

@ Identify which of these approaches best describes what you are intending to do in your own comparative essay. Write 2-3 paragraphs explaining what you are going to focus on.

@ Later on, when you are more familiar with Angelou's poetry and your novel, you should write a draft introduction like the one above.

Section 5 Analysing the poems in 'And Still I Rise' (1978)

A note on Maya Angelou's Poetry

There are some poets who are instantly recognisable. You only have to read a few lines and you know exactly whose work you are reading. Everything is shot through with their unique poetic identity (or what we usually refer to as their voice). Some readers experience this highly distinctive quality when they encounter Maya Angelou's poems; other reader emphasise the eclectic mix of styles and voices they encounter in her poetry. Perhaps it is something about the sound and rhythms, the look on the page, or a constancy to a particular set of places or vocabularies that make her writing stand out. The pleasure in reading the next poem comes partly from the fresh value of each new work in its own right but also from the accumulated knowledge of the rest of the work, a return to familiar experiences in a known and recognisable poetic world. Think about how you experience her poems as you make your way through the collection 'And Still I Rise'. Notice patterns and connections across and between poems; group them in different ways; and include any other poems by Angelou that you feel connect in interesting ways with poems in 'And Still I Rise' and potentially with your novel. Be open to all possibilities; you will undoubtedly come across many as you conduct your research!

Over the page are detailed questions on the first poem in the collection. These questions focus on Angelou's choices of form, structure, tone, language and style, as well as theme and subject matter. You should use this as a guide to analysing the rest of the poems. Always consider-:

Subject matter

Form

Structure

Tone

Language and style @ Answer Questions on 'A Kind Of Love, Some Say'

1. This is the first poem in the collection. How far do you feel that this poem forms an appropriate introduction to And Still I Rise? (You should come back to this question and respond once you have read the collection!) 2. What, for you, are the themes that emerge in this poem? 3. How would you describe the tone and style Angelou uses in this poem to explore the disturbingly close relationship between love and hate? 4. In terms of form, the poem consists of two stanzas, an octane and a quintet. What does each stanza focus on? 5. What is the effect of personifying the victim’s ribs in the first stanza? Comment also on the reference made to different parts of the victim’s body in the first stanza. 6. Look for different ways of grouping some of the words in the poem. For example, pay attention to the way Angelou draws on the semantic field of physical violence; and the way she uses end of line and internal rhyme to link words. Comment on these. 7. Some readers feel the poem seems to end with a quiet and profound philosophical conclusion. What do you think this understated ‘conclusion’ is? How do you interpret the poem’s final stanza? (You could comment on Angelou’s description of hate as “confused” with “its limits..in zones beyond itself”; her use of enjambment; the connotations of the expression “will not learn”; and the effect of describing ‘love’ as ‘torture’, and the way in which you interpret her tone at the end of the poem- pessimistic resignation, defiant resilience and endurance, or something more ambiguous?).

Section 6: 'And Still I Rise'- a list of poems (for you to tick off/ link and group)

1. A Kind of Love, Some Say

2. Country Lover

3. Remembrance

4. Where We Belong, a Duet

5. Phenomenal Woman

6. Men

7. Refusal

8. Just for a Time

9. Junkie Monkey Reel

10. The Lesson

11. California Prodigal

12. My Arkansas

13. Through the Inner City to the Suburbs

14. Lady Luncheon Club

15. Momma Welfare Roll

16. The Singer Will Not Sing

17. Willie

18. To Beat the Child Was Bad Enough

19. Woman Work 20. One More Round

21. The Traveller

22. Kin

23. The Memory

24. Still I Rise

25. Ain’t That Bad

26. Life Doesn’t Frighten Me

27. Bumb D’Bump

28. On Aging

29. In Retrospect

30. Just Like Job

31. Call Letters: Mrs V B

32. Thank You, Lord

Section 7: Basic critical Introductions

A defender of Maya Angelous poetry

A critic of Maya Angelous poetry