A "Door-In" to Literature

During class as we discussed Their Eyes Were Watching God for the final time, we talked about how it can be viewed as a love story or a story of Janie’s empowerment as a woman. I believe that looking at those two interpretations as mutually exclusive is wrong, likely brought on by an assumption that love stories must inherently be simple and meaningless. However, just because a love story can be about individual empowerment does not mean that Their Eyes Were Watching God is both of those things. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a love story but certainly not a novel about Janie’s empowerment.   What does it mean for Their Eyes Were Watching God to be a love story? It simply means that the plot revolves around love. It revolves are Janie’s relationships with various men and how she feels about them. Obviously, the novel is more complex than the image that I get in my head of the classic romance novel, straying very far from the formula of the genre. But I’m not claiming that Their...

For reference, this poem, presented by Cadi, is on page 17 of the Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry   In class, we discussed how “Not About Poems” could be talking about a poet writing a poem. We said perhaps the poet is a lonely poet and thus every poem they write is inherently lonely as well. The lines “i can write about almost anything— // but a lonely poem ain’t got / no audience” (Rodgers 17-19). Could potentially be hinting at this point but are somewhat ambiguous. Is the lonely poem “about almost anything” or is it just that the poet chooses to write lonely poetry, distinct from those ideas discussed in the verse preceding it. Obviously, even asking what seems to be a simple question, that of “what makes a poem lonely”, is incredibly ambiguous. Here I want to focus on some more intense ambiguity in the poem and some potential interpretations. In the final lines of the poem, Rodgers writes “i say / oh say / can you hurt? // who needs me…” (25-28). There are three in...