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CLOSE READING/RESEARCH PAPER,

CLOSE READING/RESEARCH PAPER,. Guided by YOUR subject location concerns/questions/theoretical lens Contextualized historically and socially Attending to action, character, theme, language, narrative structure, prose devices, other.

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CLOSE READING/RESEARCH PAPER,

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  1. CLOSE READING/RESEARCH PAPER, • Guided by YOUR subject location concerns/questions/theoretical lens • Contextualized historically and socially • Attending to action, character, theme, language, narrative structure, prose devices, other

  2. Narrative trajectory (struggle &triumph): actions, agents, thematic development • Part 1: Childhood, collapse of idealized family, critique of feudal/colonial/religious systems. • Part 2: Entry into U.S., search, flight, social injustice, degradation, male-bonding/ brotherhood. • Part 3: Social & political brotherhood, resistance, union organization, failure. • Part 4: Disease, ‘universal’ intellectual brotherhood, uplift, women’s influence, “success.”

  3. Masculinity under interrogation (gender studies) Ch. 17& 18, Los Angeles • 131, Pinoys in sex service • 142, as ‘domestic animals’ • ? • ? • ?

  4. Ch. 19-25: external & internal ‘brutality” • 143 “the year of the great hatred; the lives of Filipinos were cheaper than those of dogs” • 144-45 anti-miscegenation laws: brown men and white women’s bodies • 147 “the paradox of America” • 152 “trying to escape from the barbarian that was myself”

  5. Raced masculinity (brown bodies) • Male gaze (racialized): brown men looking at white female bodies • Historical context: Anti-miscegenation laws, scarcity, criminalized, Ch.19, 143-203) • Psycho-social dynamics: Desire as lack--the Other; forbidden, feared, female and male white bodies; suggestions of same-sex relationships, Amado and lawyer in Phoenix, 201 • Whiteness as repulsion and attraction

  6. Bodies: gendered, racialized, and classed • Select passages where images of whiteness and white women’s bodies are rendered, and analyze HOW the language works to suggest and develop point-of-view, character, conflict, value, and theme. Tension between erotic charge and sublimated/displaced desire • 141 “my ecstasy”; 216 “sit with a white girl” ; 229 ‘approach a decent white woman”; 286-287 significance of ‘white rug’ (displacement?)

  7. Different lenses: Representations of women--mothers, whores, & angels (feminist discourse) • 1. Mother and other surrogate mother figures “. • 2. Young women in Part 1--contemptuous, manipulative, threat to male freedom. • 3. Women in 2 & 3--predatory, unfaithful, weak, victims, threat and threatened. • Women in 3 & 4--transitional (Marian, 209-11), uplifting muses (Dora, 224); maternal (Alice, 229 Eileen, 234 “no disturbing sensuousness” “almost maternal solicitude:) virginal (Mary, 300 “She was an angel molded into purity”)

  8. Problematic relations with women • 258: “Why were the women in my life always crying?” Moment of self-reflection, self-analysis, self-truth? Or moment of slippage, unconscious self-revelation? Language is ambivalent, slippages between blame and self-blame, glimpse of larger forces, unresolved tensions in ideal of masculinity

  9. Theme/pattern shaped by generic structure & expectations • Picaresque: low-life, social range, fast action • Bildungsroman: ‘education’/development • Manhood--through male role models, brothers, Pinoy compatriots, positive & negative (absence of positive white male models) • Class/labor (Mexican) solidarity 196 “magic of their marching feet” • “America”: Eileen “She was the America I wanted to find. . . This America was human, good, and real”

  10. Class/anti-colonial/race (citizenship) struggles ‘a new world’: intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic solidarity, unionism (forces & themes inextricably inter-related • 295 “poverty was the thread of my life, . . . gave it a rounded meaning” • 311 “common faith in the working man” • 313 “turbulent dream of history the one and only common thread that bound us together, white & black & brown, in America”

  11. Methods and Movements • ‘Consciousness-raising’; collective action; strikes, communication (newsletters, magazines).; solidarity. • Narrative of idealism, pioneering acts, failure, re-groupings, internal and external divisions, subversives, Communist appropriation, ideological splits (proletarian/intellectual elite, work/college) • Fraternal groups, regional Filipino workers, cannery, farming, urban, to inter-ethnic, national orgs--AFL, CIO;

  12. Kuntslerroman: narrative of the growth of an artist, internal and external forces Internal: agency, resistance, self-empowerment, 180; 217 against ‘toxic amnesia”; 261, “It’s a great wrong that a man should go hungry & illiterate & miserable in America. . . . Maybe I could write it down for all the world to see.” “felt vast and immortal” External: Influence of women, teachers, muses • Eileen 235, “writing letters to Eileen was . . . My course in English” Influence of reading (male texts) 246 “a spiritual kinship with other men” “the place did not matter”

  13. Conclusion: Resolution, triumph? • Role of contingency: Pearl Harbor, WW ll • Emergence as writer • Symbolic action--black worker and Marcario’s ten cents--’communion’/beer • Closing visions--“Patriotic discourse”: endings of parts 2, 3, & 4: 188-9, 261, 326-7 • Slippage between I & We, lone(ly) & collective subjectivity

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