Close Reading and Cultural Specificity: Teaching “Sonny’s Blues” in Korea

초록

This essay shares my experience of teaching James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in an “Introduction to English Literature” course, offered to second-year English majors at a Korean university. The cultural barrier between my students and the narrative world of “Sonny’s Blues” is high. Yet my students’ unfamiliarity with the codes of US race relations can be turned into a pedagogical asset. I teach the story over three weeks, focusing on three elements of fiction: point of view, setting, and plot. Teaching how to close read has proven to be an effectual way to help my students appreciate the cultural specificity of the story. The first week is devoted to exploring the unnamed narrator’s flaw. His character flaw is linked to his inability to provide the readers with a clear view of Sonny. The second week is spent exploring the urban ghetto as social space. When students begin noticing the importance of the setting, they are asked to link the social logic of Harlem to the dominant emotion in the narrator’s psyche—fear. In the final week, the students examine bebop as a situated cultural expression against racism. By momentarily relieving the narrator of the fear that led to his judgmental aloofness, Sonny’s performance allows the brothers to overcome their alienation. I conclude that paying attention to textual details can begin to redress the universalizing tendency that has dominated “Sonny’s Blues” scholarship for decades.

키워드