The-Bluest-Eye-教案

1、Title: The Bluest Eye-Toni MorrisonTeaching Aims: The teaching of this lesson aims to enable students to master:1 20 key words and about 100 other new words2 20 key phrases and their translations3 the way of analyzing the usage of metaphor in this lesson4 the way of dividing the lesson 5 the skills

2、of translation in ten sentences6 the main idea stated by the authorThe teaching of this lesson is divided into five partsPart One: Background Information(in one period)In this part, the teacher and the students are working together to offer as much information as possible in one period. Information

3、comes in all directions. In this way , views of the students can be broadened and versions of the world can be easily seen. We follow two procedures:I: The teacher gives a brief introduction about the background information and guides the students to the text by asking some questions.Toni Morrison w

4、as born in Ohio in 1931. This text is taken from her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970).This novel is divided into four parts which were named after four seasons: autumn( she went into the society with a wish that she would have the bluest eyes some day; winter(she was suffering parents beating, clas

5、smates scorn and adults coldness and was raped by her father); spring(she was pregnant); summer( she gave birth to a baby who was dead when she was 13). In the end she went into insanity.Seasons-nature-law-inevitableDesire for the bluest eye: symbolize black peoples confusion and dislocation of valu

6、es when their own culture are restrained and restricted.Centre on eye : symbolize how black people observe and perceive the white peoples worldHer longing for eye: symbolize that she wanted to accept white peoples culture and wanted to observe the world with their eyesHer theme: history, destiny and

7、 spirit, or mental worldThe people in todays lesson :Louis and his wife, Geraldine with a son named Junior, PecolaII: Some students are asked to introduce some important notes because they have got some relevant information from the internet to help understand the lesson.1 About the author:Present t

8、he picture downloaded from the internet and try to make the author impressive in the students minds.2 brown girls3 Lifebuoy soap, Cashmere Bouquet talc, Jergens Lotion, Dixie Peach4 Washington Irving SchoolPart Two Detailed Study of the Text(in six periods)In this part, the teacher finishes the expl

9、anation of words, sentences, grammar in six periods.Approaches used in this part:1 Raising questions to make the students think differently;2 Explaining some points;3 Discussing some topics in pairs or with the teacher4 Communicating with the students by repeating some words, some sentences or some

10、explanations.5 Asking volunteers to read each paragraph or asking them to read together.6 Asking them to summarize the main idea in each paragraph and in each section separately7 Asking them to seek some transitional paragraphs or sentences8 Asking them to analyze the rhetorical speeches used in som

11、e sentences and master the skills used in organizing the ideas.9 Asking them to paraphrase as many sentences as possible10 Making them pay attention to the special usages of some common wordsThe Bluest Eye(Excerpts)Additional Material1 About the AuthorToni Morrison has a unique status InternetAmeric

12、an literature. She is the winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award(1977),the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction(1988) and many other literary awards. She was granted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993,thus becoming the first African-American writer to receive this honor. She has published 7 novel

13、s, a musical. A play, and a collection of critical essays. Her devoted readers are found all over the world, and they include both sexes and all colors, ages and creeds. A member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Morrison has activel

14、y used her influence to encourage the publication of other African-American writers.Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Woodford InternetLorain, Ohio Internet1931.She came from a family of sharecroppers, who moved from the southern racism. At the age of 18 Morrison went to Washington D.C. to attend

15、 Howard University, the most distinguished black college InternetAmerica, where she became interested InternetThe stage and joined the Howard University Players. After she earned a B.A. in English from Howard she went to Cornell University for gradate studies in English literature. Upon receiving a

16、M. A. from Cornell, she began her teaching career. From 1955 to 1957 she taught English at Texas Southern University, and from 1957 to 1964 she taught at Howard. Internet1965, she became a senior editor at Random House, where she edited a number of African-American writers. Internet1958 she married

17、Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and had two sons. In 1964 they divorced and she raised the two sons by herself. She began writing in 1962 Her first work was a short story, which would late develop into her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970). It tells the story of a little black girl named Pocol

18、a Breedlove, who yearned to have the blue eyes of a white girl. She believes she will lead a happy life if only she has beautiful blue eyes.In 1971 Morrison resumed her teaching career, teaching English at University of New York, serving as a visiting professor at Yale from 1976 to 1978, at the Stat

19、e University of Yew York at Albany from 1984 to 1989. Since 1989 she has been teaching at Princeton University as a member of the program in African-American studies and of the creative writing department. Meanwhile she continued her writing. Her next novel, Saul(1974) examines the friendship betwee

20、n two black women Sulfa and Nell, and depicts how they have grown up together but taken different roads of life in their maturity. The novel won the National Book Critic Award. The Song of Solomon, published in 1977, was a greater success than her previous novels. Set in Michigan in the early 1930s,

21、 the novel is narrated from a male point of view. In his efforts to recover his ancestors properties, a sack of gold, Milkman Dead rediscovers his racial roots and cultural identity. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and it placed Toni Morrison in the first rank of American novelists

22、. Tar Baby came out in 1981. Unlike her precious novels, this book has characters both black and white. By juxtaposing them in the central conflict of the plot, the author dramatizes the racial complexities that characterize the American cultural landscape. Published in 1987, Morrisons next work Bel

23、oved deals with slavery and infanticide. It was another triumph and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The protagonist Seethe has run away from slavery and is seeking refuge in Ohio. When the slave masters search for her, she kills her baby girl in order to save her from slavery she has j

24、ust escaped. However, the ghost of the baby “Beloved”, a name written on her tombstone, comes back to hunt her. In Jazz (1992), Joe, the unfaithful husband of Violet, kills a girl he loves so much in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative gradually unfolds, showing how and why this tragedy happe

25、ns in Harlem, New York. Paradise (1998) is the most recent work by Ruby, a tiny all-black farming community in Oklahoma,and its ancestral feuds and financial quarrels.Morrisons novels are mostly set in black community in the thirties or forties, but they do not merely tell stories. When talking abou

26、t the novel, she says, “it should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have something in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the problems are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe. If anything I do, in the way of

27、writing novels (or whatever I write), isnt about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams-which is to say yes, the work

28、must be political. It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”(“ Rooted ness: The Ancestor as Foundation”) The Nobel Prize presentation speech points out, “In her depictions of the world of th

29、e black people, in life as in legend, Toni Morrison has given the Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece.” Yet, at the same time, her work is always symbolic of the shared human condition, transcending lines of gender, race, and class. The most enduring impression her novels leave i

30、s of “empathy, of compassion with ones fellow human beings”.About the Novel The Bluest EyePublished in 1970, the novel has its setting in black community in Lorain, in 1941, long before the Civil Rights Movement. In those days, blackness was synonymous with ugliness. The dominant white culture exerc

31、ised its hegemony and dictated standards of beauty. Many black people accepted and internalized white values and developed self-contempt and self-hatred for themselves or other black people, making some of their own people victims and scapegoats. To overthrow white cultural hegemony and liberate the

32、mselves from oppression and self-oppression, the black people raised the political slogan in the 1960s:”Blcak is beautiful.”Morrisons novel The Bluest Eyes depicts the pernicious psychological impact that the dominant white cultural values have had on black people.The story centers around the tragic

33、 life of a little black girl named Pocola Breedlove. The Breedlove are the poorest family of the town. They live in a storefront of an abandoned store. The place is so ugly that” visitors who drive to this tiny town wonder why it has not been torn down, while pedestrians, who are residents of the ne

34、ighborhood, simply look away when they pass it ”.Pocola ,eleven years old, is black and ugly. Her father, holly Breed love, is driven to alcoholism by a life of appalling racial oppression. Once he burned up his house and turned his family outdoors. Her mother, Pauline, is driven by her husbands rag

35、e and the unbearable misery of her life. She tries to escape from life and finds peace only in working as a servant in a white home. She gives more care and attention to her master children than her own little girl. The poverty-stricken and frustrated couple is constantly quarreling and fighting. Th

36、ey totally ignore their daughter Peculiar school other children bully and ridicule her. calling her ugly. Imprisoned by dire poverty and extreme misery, Pocola wishes for lighter skin, blond hair and especially blue eyes like movie star Shirley Temple and other white girls. Everyday she prays for a

37、miracle to happen so that she is given a pair of the bluest eyes. she believe that her ugliness is the source of all her misery and that having blue eyes would be the key to happiness. She is convinced that if she had blue eyes, she would become pretty and happy and that all her problems would be go

38、ne. Finally, through madness, she thinks that her eyes have become blue. In her imagination she has been transformed into a pretty girl. As she is waiting for love and happiness to come to her, ironically her drunken father gets home, and gives “l(fā)ove” to his daughter by raping her. The little girl b

39、ecomes pregnant and she gives birth to a stillborn child. She sinks deeper into despair and madness. In the end of the novel,” She was so sad to see. Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outrightthe damage done was total. ”Pocolas father dies in the workh

40、ouse;her mother still does housework. Pocola and her mother move to a little house on the edge of town. The black little girl is often seen picking her way “between the tire rims and the sunflowers, among all the waste and beauty of the world- which is what she herself was”. The narrator planted som

41、e marigolds in the spring that year. but they never came out. Using the dead seeds of marigolds as a metaphor, the narrator observes in conclusion,” I even think now that the land of the entire county was hostile to nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition

42、, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesnt matter. Its too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, its much ,much ,much too late.” Pocola is a victim of racial oppression and a scapegoat for the self-

43、oppression and self-hatred existing in the black community.The Bluest Eye gives voice to the experience of growing up black in a society dominated by white, middle-class ideology. Morrison once said,” Beauty, loveactually, I think, all the time that I write, Im writing about love or its absence.I th

44、ought in The Bluest Eye, that I was writing about beauty, miracles, and self-images, about the way in which people can hurt each other, about whether or not one is beautiful.”The author begins the novel with a simple primer text, one of the first things every American child reads when he/she begins

45、school. This white, middle-class reader text goes like this;Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Deckhand Jane live in the green-and white house. they are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who

46、will play with Jane? See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. Come and play with Jane. The kitten will not play. See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is s

47、miling. Smile, Father ,smile. See the dog. Bowwow goes the dog. Do you want to play with Jane? See the dog run. Run, dog, run. Look, look. Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They will play a good game. Play, Jane, play.Morrison said in an interview,” In The Bluest Eye I used the pr

48、imer story, with its picture of a happy family, as a frame acknowledging the outer civilization. The primer with white children was the way life was presented to the black people.” In reality, the black life is quite the opposite of the typical middle-class white life described in the primer. Pocola

49、 is not Jane. She is a complete victim of the circumstances.Detailed Study of the TextPart(paras.1-9)How is the text structured?Taken from a novel, our text is not exactly like a complete, well-structured story. We may roughly divide the text into two parts. Paragraphs 19, which form the first secti

50、on, describe a type of charactersthe brown girls. Part two , which begins from Paragraph 10,tells the story about what happens to the little black girl Pocola in the house of such a brown girl.Para.1They come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian.They refer to a charact

51、er type the author describes in this passage. The author points out, ”They are thin brown girls who have looked long at hollyhocks in the backyards of Meridian, Mobile, Aiken, and Baton Rouge. ”(Para.2)These brown girls have lighter skins than other black people because of their mixed blood. Many of

52、 them are descendents of former slaves who were house servants. Working in the house rather than in the fields, they were closer to their white slave owners than the field Negroes. It was a common thing for a white master to have babies with black maids. These house servants usually felt superior to

53、 field Negroes .(2)The author mentions several places: Mobile(in southwest Alabama),Aiken(in west South Carolina) ,Newport News(in southeast Virginia),Marietta(in northwest Georgia) and Meridian(in east Mississippi). There is one thing in common among them, that is .they are all towns in the Deep So

54、uth, where slavery and the plantation system existed before the Civil War .The setting of the novel The Bluest eye is an industrial town called Lorain in Ohio, which is in Midwest and different from the Deep South .And the sounds of these places in their mouths make you think of love .When the brown

55、 girls pronounce the names of these places, they are full of affection and make other people associate these places with love.4.they tilt their heads and say “Mobile” and you think youve been kissed.They say “Mobile” with pride. ”You think youve been kissed “is another way of saying “the sounds of t

56、hese places in their mouths make you think of love”.5.They say ”Aiken ”and you see a white butterfly glance off a fence with a torn wing.(1) glance off: to hit a surface at an angle and then move away from it in another direction (2)a white butterfly glance off a fence with a torn wing: Here the aut

57、hor uses a butterfly with a torn wing as a metaphor, meaning fragile beauty. (3)The implied meaning is that life in the Deep South seems romantic and fills them with sentimental nostalgia, although life there is not easy.6.”Yes,I will.”Again, this is associated with “l(fā)ove ”.When a man proposes marri

58、age, he asks the woman, ”Will you marry me?” If the woman agrees to marry him ,her answer will be :”Yes ,I will,”7.but you love what happens to the air when they open their lips and let the names ease out.That means they say those names in a very gentle and tender manner.Para.28. How does the author

59、 describe the brown girls from the Deep South cities in Paragraph 2? In this paragraph the author gives a general picture of who these brown girls are , what they are like, and how they live. The descriptions show that they are thoroughly assimilated into the white, middle-class way of life.9. The s

60、ound of it opens the windows of a room like the first four notesof a hymn.hymn: a song of praise to GodWhen one sings a hymn, the very first four notes will fill ones heart with an are of freshness, just like opening a window of a room. The sound of the four-syllable name of Meridian has the same ef