Monday, April 28, 2008

We will meet in the Writing Center tomorrow for peer reviews.

posted by Professor Wanda's Posse at 9:36 AM

2 Comments:

Blogger Deon J. said...

Deon Johnson
English 1A 8-9am
April 29,2008

*IM NOT SURE IS THIS THE PLACE TO PUT OUR PAPER, BUT HERE IS MINE*

Ms. Alice Walker: Social, Activist Entrepreneur!

By: Deon Johnson
English 1A 8-9am

Initial Planning Sheet:

1.What is the subject of your paper?
a.Alice Walker

2.Why do you want to write about this subject?
a.I want to write about Alice Walker because she fit the guidelines; she’s a entrepreneur who is a artist who also is an activist.

3.What audience will you write for?
a.The audience that I’m writing for are people who are or wants to be involved in helping society, rather it’s a social entrepreneur or philanthropist.

4.What questions do you want your research paper to answer?
a.What differences/effects has this organization made in its community? What is this organizations mains goal(s)/solutions to the unresolved issues they want to solve? What inspired/caused the founder(s) to take a stand to make changes and help the people in their community?

5.What is the main writing strategy you think you will use?
a.The strategies that I’m using are description, problem/solution, argument, and cause/effect.

Definitions:

1.Social Entrepreneur:
•a person who uses creative business practice to start a social services organization

2.Philanthropist:
•The effort or inclination to increase the well-being of humankind, as by charitable aid or donations
• Something, such as an activity or institution, intended to promote human welfare.


You have your poets, your novelists, your essayists, and your short story writers in the world of literature, then you have Ms. Walker. Alice Walker is in a category in her own, using all of those genres, with a touch of personal experiences, to complete your hunger of passion. Although most critics categorize her writings as feminist, Walker describes herself as a “womanist,” which she defines as “a women who loves other women… Appreciates and prefers women culture, woman’s emotional flexibility… and woman’s strength… Loves the spirit… Loving [self] regardless,” (Gentry). Walker’s thoughts and feelings and activism shows through in her writings of poetry, novels, and her everyday movement to make this world better for people to live in. Alice Walker writes through her feelings and the morals that she has grown with she writes about the black woman’s struggle, including spiritual wholeness. She also writes about sexual, political, and racial equality.
Alice Walker, one of the best-known and most highly respected writers in the United States, was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. Her parents were sharecroppers, and money was not always available as needed. At the tender age of eight, Walker lost sight in one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. This left her in a depressed state, and she secluded herself from the other children, stating, “I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems.” The experience of this disfigurement profoundly influenced Walker's life, leading her into a self-imposed isolation that was open only to her thirst for reading and her love of poetry. Her self-imposed alienation, coupled with her fear of becoming totally blind, encouraged the young girl to search people and relationships closely—to discover the inner truths masked by facades of acceptance and equality. Walker used her blinded eye as a filter through which to look beyond the surface of African American women's existence, and discovered that she cared about both the pain and spiritual decay she found hidden there. During this seclusion from other kids her age, Walker began to write poems. Hence, her career as a writer began; much of Walker's fiction is informed by her Southern background; growing up in Eatonton Georgia, a rural town where most blacks worked as tenant farmers.

Despite this tragedy in her life and the feelings of inferiority, Walker became valedictorian of her class in high school and received a “rehabilitation scholarship” to attend Spellman. “On leaving, her mother gave her three special gifts: a suitcase, for traveling the world, a typewriter, for creativity, and a sewing machine, for self-sufficiency,” (White). Spellman College was a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia, not far from Walker’s home. While at Spellman, Walker became involved in civil rights demonstrations, where she spoke out against the silence of the institution’s curriculum when it came to African-American culture and history, and participated in sit-ins at local business establishments; her involvement in such activities led to her dismissal from the college. So she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and had the opportunity to travel to Africa as an exchange student. Upon her return, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. She received a writing fellowship and was planning to spend it in Senegal, West Africa, but her plans changed when she decided to take a job as a case worker in the New York City welfare department. Walker later moved to Tugaloo, Mississippi, during which time she became more involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She used her own and others’ experiences as material for her searing examinations of politics. She also volunteered her time working at the voter registration drive in Mississippi. Walker often admits that her decision not to take the writing fellowship was based on the realization that she could never live happily in Africa or anywhere else until she could live freely in Mississippi. Since then Walker has focused more on her writing and has taught at various colleges and universities. It was not until she began teaching that her writing career really took off. She began teaching at Jackson State, then Tugaloo, and finally at Wellesley College. She was also a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute from 1971 to 1973, and it was in her last year there that she published her first collection of stories, In Love and Trouble.

Walker is one of the most prolific black women writers in America. Her work consistently reflects her concern with racial, sexual, and political issues-particularly with black woman's struggle for survival. She explained, "The black woman is one of America's greatest heroes.” Not enough credit has been given to the black woman who has been oppressed beyond recognition." Walker's insistence on giving black women their due resulted in one of the most widely read novels in America today, Alice’s third novel, The Color Purple. The was the first book I had read by Alice Walker, the novel traces thirty years in the life of Celie, a poor Southern black woman who is victimized physically and emotionally by her step-father and husband, evident to life imitating art, Celie was a woman from Alice’s real life.

While The Color Purple is her most widely read novel, her first novel was, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), however, both carries many of her prevalent themes; particularly the domination of powerless women by equally powerless men. In this novel, which spans the years between the Depression and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Walker showed three generations of a black sharecropping family and explored the effects of poverty and racism on their lives. Because of his sense of failure, Grange Copeland leads his wife to suicide and abandons his children to seek a better life in the North. His traits are passed on to his son, Brownfield, who in time murders his wife. In the end of the novel, Grange returns to his family a broken yet compassionate man and attempts to make up for all the hurt he has caused in the past with the help of his granddaughter, Ruth. While some people accused Walker of reviving stereotypes about the dysfunctional black family, others praised her use of intensive, descriptive language in creating believable characters.

In addition to being a novelist, Walker is also considered an accomplished poet. Walker’s first collection, Once: Poems (1968), includes works written during the early 1960's while she attended Sarah Lawrence College. Some of these pieces relate the confusion, isolation, and suicidal thoughts Walker experienced. For she had learned her senior year that she was pregnant and had to deal with the stressful time that followed. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Walker’s second volume of poems, in this she addressed such topics as love, individualism, and revolution. When Alice Walker lived in Mississippi and was active in the civil rights movement and teaching she experienced these things. With Walker's most recent poems she expresses her ideas of race, gender, environment, love, hate and suffering, the same topics she writes about in her novels.
In addition to her novels, and poetry, Walker has also published two volumes of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman down: Stories (1981), both of which evidence her “womanist” philosophy. It’s important, frankly political, semi-taboo subject matter should automatically make "You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down" fascinating to anyone, black or white, with his head not completely entrenched in the sand. Miss Walker has, moreover, at least one priceless literary gift: that of sounding absolutely authoritative:
"And there was the smell of clean poverty . . . a sharp, bitter odor, almost acrid, as if the women washed themselves in chemicals." "She was attractive, but just barely and with effort. Had she been the slightest bit overweight, for instance, she would have . . . faded into the background where, even in a revolution, fat people seem destined to go." Then too, she has a watchful eye for such quirky, small details as the church pew, "straight and spare as Abe Lincoln lying down," lugged up from the rural South to decorate an East Village living room, or the "overdressed" Mai Tais in an Alaskan bar: "in addition to the traditional umbrella, there were tiny snowshoes," (Laurent).
These comparatively modest stories, though, are outweighed by those that are at once more overtly political and more stylistically innovative. But as Miss Walker aims for more, she achieves less. These latter stories occupy a sort of middle ground between personal statement, political parable, conventional story and vaguely experimental fiction--and this is not a comfortable place for short stories to find themselves. As fiction, they must be about particular people, but as parable, they must be about people as types. As personal statement, or as conventional fiction, they lead us to think we are hearing the voice of the author; the experimental techniques that Miss Walker employs subvert that assumption by calling our attention to the author as inventor and manipulator of every aspect of what we are reading.

Overall Alice Walker has been a very influential author throughout the black community, and her audiences are very much interracial. Although many of the criticisms are controversial on her view of black men and their abuse toward black women, that depiction cannot be narrowed down to only that, there is much more that is present in Alice Walker’s writing. Her feelings, morals and the opinions Walker has towards women, sexuality, and racial equality shine through her works of all literature.

Walker found the love of her life in 1967, a white activist civil rights lawyer name Mel Leventhal, and they were married in 1967. A year later she gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca. She met her future husband Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney, in Mississippi where she was an activist and teacher. In 1967 Walker and Leventhal married, becoming the first legally married interracial couple to reside in Jackson, the state capital. They divorced in 1976.

Walker is still very much involved in the Civil Rights Movement and has spoken for the women’s movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation. She also started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press, in 1984.Walker writing is a tangle of personal and political themes, and she has produced five novels, two collections of short stories, numerous volumes of poetry, and two books of essays that address such issues. She has won fame and recognition in many countries but has not lost her sense of rootedness in the South. She also recognizes her mother as showing her the life of “an artist entailed.” In her famous essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden,” she talks about watching her mother at the end of a day of back-breaking physical labor on someone else’s farm return home, only to walk the long distance to their well to get water for her garden planted each year at their doorstep. She gives her mother full credit as showing her what it means to be an artist of dedication and showing a tough conviction that life without beauty is unbearable.

Walker was also influenced by a number of other prominent authors, including Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple, perhaps her most famous work. Among her other numerous awards are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, and the Townsend Prize (Winchell). Among the many themes that Walker has addressed in her works include: Incest, lesbian love, sibling devotion, sexual , racial realities, and the unavoidable connections between family and society. She is probably best known for her works on racial inequality, and Walker comments on this by saying, “Race is just the first question on a long list. This is hard for just about everybody to accept; we’ve been trying to answer it for so long.”
Overall Alice Walker has been a very influential author throughout the black community, and her audiences are very much interracial. To Walker, it seems, art and life, words and love, justice-making and play, shaped her vocation as literary mirror-holder and lamp-lighter, as a women of color. Recently, Alice Walker announced that she was retiring, stating her ancestors have set her free; they relived her from her job, with a job well done. Though she’s done with writing, and she’d quit on top, Alice Walker will be forever one of the best authors of all time.

Work Cited


1. White, Evelyn. Alice Walker: A Life. New York, N.Y, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2004.

2. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

3. McMahon, Toni. “Women Writers of Color.” Alice Walker. (1996): 1-4 On-line. U. of Minnesota, Internet. 6 March 1998.
(Available at: http://english.cla.umn.edu/lkd/vfg/Authors/Alice Walker)

4. Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

5. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

6. Gentry, Tony. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea, 1993.

7. Laurent, Maria. Alice Walker. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

8. Walker, Alice. The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. New York: Random House, 2000.

9. Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992.

10. Alice Malsenior Walker: An Annotated Bibliography 1968-1986 by Louis H. Pratt and Darnell D. Pratt, Westport, Connecticut, Meckler, 1988; Alice Walker: An Annotated Bibliography 1968-1986 by Erma Davis Banks and Keith Byerman, London, Garland, 1989.
11. The Color Purple, writ. Alice Walker and Menno Meyjes, dir. Steven Spielberg (Burbank, Calif.: Warner Bros., 1985).

12. Euben, Paul P. "Chapter 10: Alice Walker." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL:http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/walker.html (provide page date or date of your login).

Outline: On Alice Walker

Thesis:
Walker’s thoughts and feelings and activism shows through in her writings of poetry, novels, and her everyday movement to make this world a better life for someone else. Alice Walker writes through her feelings and the morals that she has grown with, she writes about the black woman’s struggle including spiritual wholeness, sexual, political, and racial equality.

Major Point 1:
Despite this tragedy in her life and the feelings of inferiority, Walker became valedictorian of her class in high school and received a “rehabilitation scholarship” to attend Spellman. On leaving, her mother gave her three special gifts: a suitcase, for traveling the world, a typewriter, for creativity, and a sewing machine, for self-sufficiency.

Major Point 2:
Overall Alice Walker has been a very influential author throughout the black community, and her audiences are very much interracial. Although many of the criticisms are controversial on her view of black men and their abuse toward black women, that depiction cannot be narrowed down to only that, there is much more that is present in Alice Walker’s writing.

Introduction:
There are many different types of authors in the world of literature; authors of horror, romance, suspense, and the type that Alice Walker writes about, through personal experiences. Although most critics categorize her writings as feminist, Walker describes herself as a “womanist,” she defines this as “a women who loves other women… Appreciates and prefers women culture, woman’s emotional flexibility… and woman’s strength… Loves the spirit… Loving [self] regardless.” Walker’s thoughts and feelings and activism shows through in her writings of poetry, novels, and her everyday movement to make this world a better life for someone else. Alice Walker writes through her feelings and the morals that she has grown with, she writes about the black woman’s struggle including spiritual wholeness, sexual, political, and racial equality.

Conclusion:
Her feelings, morals and the opinions Alice has towards women, sexuality, and racial equality shine through her works of all literature. To Walker, it seems, art and life, words and love, justice-making and play, shape her vocation as literary mirror-holder and lamp-lighter, as vocal woman of color. Alice Walker is an African American essayist, novelist and poet. She tries to incorporate the concepts of her heritage that are absent into her essays; such things as how women should be independent and find their special talent which she use art to make life better. Through reading and learning about Alice Walker made me find my “art.” I only pray that my art can touch as many people have her art as.

8:38 AM  
Blogger Professor Wanda's Posse said...

No Deon, this isn't the correct location, so I moved it to the original post where all the drafts are.

11:40 AM  

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