Category: McCoy Fall 2016

To understand the culture of a new area, one must first understand the land that surrounds them and the symbolism that comes with it. This is where mapping comes in. In Toomer’s novel, Cane, African Americans travel from the south to the north where everything is a stark contrast. It is uncharted territory (Pg 152). This is how Toomer establishes the Great Migration in his novel as they go to an unknown territory in Part II of Cane. Part I is in the south where the landscape is described in a beautiful, serene setting. However, as they move to the North, away from what they know and to a place that they view as opportunity, they realize this uncharted territory for African Americans was not as hospitable as they thought. The North was originally symbolized a new beginning, but now it is a place of discrimination, hardship, and isolation. Industry surrounds them with no open space for them to roam in and it seems as if they are always on display for the white population to judge.  In the North, they have to do whatever they can to survive; even if it means stooping to the lowest level and giving up certain values.                                                                                    The South represents community and the beauty of life. When Toomer describes the South, it is in a beautiful, deep, colorful place; a stark contrast to the gloomy, gray North. It is where there is light at the end of the tunnel, what they know, and people always surround them. In the North, it seems as though the people look right past them or are putting them on display, but in the south there is always someone near that is going through the same hardships, but they know they are never alone. Mapping the way from the south to the north proves how not everything is as it seems. The North was supposed to be a place of opportunity, but turned into a desolate, isolated place and their want to return to the south where their culture started grows stronger.

I wouldn’t have likened the literary analysis to science until I read this phrase from Interdisciplinarity: “if theories are disprovable, they can be tentatively accepted until they are falsified.” While we can’t necessarily prove a point concerning literature wrong, right is subjective and unattainable because of each interpretation’s inherent worth. According to Moran, Popper doesn’t  claim that science is in line with relativism. On the other hand, literary interpretation is relativistic in its nature. My reading of Cane may contradict a classmate’s, but neither claim completely invalidates the other.  Continue reading “A Commonality Between Science and English”

As I write this blog post, I am filling space. Just as we wondered,  how we affect space and how space affects us. Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, never fails to be relevant at times we least expect it to be. When one reads a chapter titled, “Science, Space and Nature”  you might conclude that this chapter will have nothing to do with literature – and quite frankly it doesn’t. But while it is not directly referring to English as a subject, it is in fact emphasizing interdisciplinarity which thus, refers to English. We used our mini-field trip in class on Wednesday to deduce that as we act on space, space then acts on us and that space exists to somehow be filled. Continue reading “What Is Space Anyways?”

I am posting another blog about Interdisciplinarity still on the science and nature chapter. Again, I did read this before class but didn’t understand until we talked about it in class, so I think it’s really wonderful that we did  talk about it. The section about travel writing really stuck in my head because I never really thought about travel writing. I didn’t think this genre, or in the book it quoted ‘in between genre’ had much value.  Continue reading “Travel writing”

The chapter in Interdisciplinarity talked about science, nature and the relationship in between all of these genres. I read this prior to class, yet I was very happy to re-read it in class because I had missed the point of the chapter. Joe Moran has talked about what we think we know to be true about science, and then has smashed that idea by saying things like Geography is not defined by nature but by culture and people. This goes against everything I have known to be true! How is space defined by people? Continue reading “Science and Space”

It wasn’t until reading Toomer’s “Cotton Song” in class that I think I really understood what Jean Toomer’s Cane was really all about. Something Professor McCoy say in class really struck a chord with me. She compared Jean Toomer writing this play as compared to a Geneseo student on their first day of classes. This idea allowed me to really understand where the narrator of the short poem was trying to get across. This poem touches on the song that the share croppers would sing while working in a cotton field. Continue reading “Literature into Cultural Romaticism”

In Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, he offers that a “theory is concerned with big questions about the nature of reality, language, power, gender, sexuality, the body, and the self, and it offers framework within which students and scholars can debate about these broad-ranging issues without getting too extensively mired in detailed arguments within disciplines” (83). I believe that Jean Toomer is exercising this ideology of “theory” through his work Cane. As Moran explains, this is a type of theory that is not used in the sciences, there is no scientific proof in supporting this type of theory. Toomer is using Cane as a vehicle for this theory where he is proposing big questions about all of these key particularities that Moran describes except he is doing so in a manner that doesn’t explicitly present these questions.

Continue reading “Cane: A Theory”

Upon my first reading of Cane, the thing that stuck out to me the most was the way that Toomer played with form and style, completely deviating from the format of a typical novel or book of poetry. The way he compiled Cane felt like a literary magazine given the mix of poetry and prose. This is reflective of the interdisciplinarity within the book itself. While some may consider English as a whole to be its own discipline, there are many conventions within the study that go far beyond simply reading and writing. Continue reading “Toomer’s Relationship with Style”

In his work Interdisciplinarity Moran mentions that, “There is a sense in which the contemporary field of ‘cultural studies’ could be said to be synonymous with interdisciplinarity itself….” (45). At first reading this I didn’t quite understand how my specific cultural experience could impact how I approached a discipline or interpreted a text. Jean Toomer quickly proved me wrong through the mention of a simple object in the short story titled “Fern”.

This transformative yet highly simplistic object that built a cultural bridge between interpretation and experience, was dirt. That’s right, red dirt. Continue reading “The Red Dirt Road”