THE WHAT
Our group has decided to create a physical book for the classroom presentation of Beloved. We all agreed that a physical book could help us create the feelings needed in order to understand the background of each character. Our book will be average size, thinking about 4 x 5 inch paper, few pages long. The cover page is still in the works but the context will (more or less) go as follows:
- Why is this text great? – a description of our opinions and experience reading the book; light colors and standard text to be aesthetically pleasing to the reader.
- History of the book – a detailed description of how the book and material came together. How and why the book gained popularity; using paper with old texture and style to stimulate history and the time the book was written (after the civil war)
- How has this work been persevered over time? – connecting to the reasoning of “why is this text great?” we can use the context in why we and how we think this book has been persevered. How we plan to do that? – create a page for the characters we feel had the most impact and influence in the text; each page will be personalized to each character’s personality and characteristics. We’ll include a strong quote that stood out to us and why we chose that character.
- Close reading analysis – using our papers, we’ll combine our analysis and create unique pages for each; to describe the close reading quote or phrase chosen, we’ll use colors, attach certain textures and use specific font types as well.
- How does this work connect with the authors other works? – There are a number of works by Toni Morrison in which we can compare Beloved An obvious comparison we can make is the consistent cover pages and fonts she uses for her books. She also has many novels written in the same time period as Beloved which we can compare.
- Creative Response – we are either going to create a graphic adaptation or a poem
- How does a text become great? – As a group, we will discuss and put together our own opinions on how a text can become great. We will give each other our own page to describe what we believe is great and then compare our opinions.
- Bibliography – same text used in “why is this text great?” to keep the appeal.
THE WHY
The reason our group chose to do a physical book is because of the event at the Center for Books Art called “History of Art Series, Panel 3: Paper as Haptic Experience.” The event described many different books that used creative paper and textures to make the reader really feel what was happening. Beloved is a book filled with strong emotional moments where we feel that can only fully be portrayed through color and texture.
The book goes back and forth from the present and the past. The character Beloved represents the past as well. In order to reflect that in our book, we will be using paper that appears to be older mixed together with paper that is newer. We have not completely agreed on a cover page, but Toni Morrison has a collection of books with the same font as Beloved on the cover. We think using that same font will be a good comparison for us to use later on in our book.
In the third section (listed in the what) we want to create pages for the characters and moments we feel were the strongest and that made the book great. With this, we want to use colors, textures, fonts, and more to give a better feeling of the moment and/or the character’s background. An example of this would be when Sethe chooses to try and murder her children rather than letting school teacher take them. Although we can put that moment into words, a page with red to represent blood, rips to represent the beatings she took during slavery, and wet spots for tears (from the pain she’s haunted by), is more powerful than words.
For the close reading, we are going to put our papers together and pick two or three of the strongest quotes or phrases to further elaborate on. Each close reading will have its own page with a unique background to fit the feelings portrayed in the text. In the seventh section (listed in the what) we also will be putting our thoughts together and give each other our own page to describe what we believe is great. We think this is an effective way to actually come to a definition, because “what is great” is subjective. At the end, we will put together a page with our similar opinions with the conclusion of what we think makes a work great.
What I love about this group’s check in is that you went back to the assignment description and tried to assess all the various aspects the assignment asks you to include in/with the book you create. I also like that you have a central interest in the characters and that you want to make a physical book.
My biggest concern right now is that your “what” is maybe still too broad. There are a lot of physical books in the world. They don’t all look alike, and they don’t all do the same thing, and many times the differences in what they intend to do inform the differences in how they look.
What kind of book do you imagine you are making? Ar you creating a textbook for high school classrooms? Or like a pseudo Cliff’s Notes??? Or do you imagine the text to be a scholarly or popular history of the book? Who is your audience and under what situation do you imagine your audience to have read Beloved, and under what situation do you imagine your audience to encounter your book?
What the book is supposed to be not only in forms it’s appearance, it also informs the content and the layout of the contents. Right now how you layout your contents seems solely driven by the way I layout the aspects you have to include in/with your book. The effect is that the book seems only like it’s a rote response to a class assignment, which is exactly what I want you to push again. Yes, I have a list of things the book needs to include, but it’s a list so that you can more easily identify the requirements and check them off. Your actual book should not be organized in this manner. The only book I can remotely imagine organizing itself along these lines is a textbook or a reader’s guide (which is why those are the examples of book types that came to my mind above). Even still if you actively decided that you are writing a textbook for a specific grade, then you will still need to tweak the categories. Imagine an AP English class, these are not the categories by which the curriculum would insist on taking the student through. You should look up AP Lit. curriculum and study guides and see the major categories they emphasize. Is it character, symbolism, cultural significance? Is it language analysis, diversity, and U.S. History?? I have no idea, you’d need to look up that information.
The type of book will also effect the cover and binding. Should you have a picture on the cover? Should it be pocket size, etc.?
I’m not saying that you have to make your book an AP Lit text guide or even a textbook. What I’m saying is that you need to imagine your books form, content, and purpose as existing in the world as a book in its own right not as a portfolio of the class assignments. And whatever you do imagine your book being in the world needs to inform your contents and how you integrate the aspects the assignment asks you to integrate.