Lecture Notes - James

Overview:

• reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a classic of the American literary canon

• Twain’s novel is a seemingly simple adventure tale about an outcast young white boy. He attempts to help a runaway slave.

  • Used to be studied extensively in American high schools.

• Everett’s novel is darkly funny and emotionally engaging. The narrative is focused on an enslaved boy named Jim, who later renames himself James. Everett asks what this American classic novel might look like through the eyes of an enslaved man.

  • He takes control of how he is perceived through his mastery of language. He renames himself.

Novel and Genre:

• Realist narrative, typical of and influenced by the nineteenth-century novel, with occasional dream sequences

• A historical novel, re-imagining a classic text/

• 1st person narrative

• A self-reflective narrator who is writing his own story. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being, I wrote myself to here.” (93)

Naming and Writing:

• “I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.” (55)

Main Themes:

• Family

• Language and the power of literacy

  • Historically, the exercise of reading and writing was believed to lead to freedom.

  • The costs of literacy

  • What it means to have literacy and what it means to not

  • When the enslaved characters talk to each other, they speak standard english. However, when they talk to white people, they speak a cliche version of ‘enslaved language’

• Identity and ownership of self

  • Who can speak for African-American people.

Other Notes:

• Think about how the intertextuality of James as a reader affects the book.

• The book was seen as a way of enriching and enlarging cultural lives

• It promoted and gave people an understanding of their ancestors and culture

• Paratext refers to all the stuff that exists before the text in the physical book. For example, the diary entry.