Creative Responses to the Bluest Eye
1.PUT TOGETHER A CAST FOR THE FILM VERSION OF THE NOVEL.
Imagine the director-producer wants a casting director to make recommendations.
Decide who would be the actors and actresses. Include photos and descriptions
of the stars and tell why each is "perfect" for the part. Write a
report to convince the producer of the selections.
2. DO A DRAMATIC READING (READER'S THEATER) OF A SCENE.
Select the scene and ask friends to help read it dramatically.
3. CONVERT THE EVENTS OF A STORY INTO A BALLAD OR SONG.
Write the lyrics and music or adapt words to a melody by someone else. Consider writing theme music for one of
the characters.
4.CREATE AN EYE-CATCHING POSTER. Choose a scene from the
book and cast it in a poster which would attract potential readers or buyers to
the book.
5. BE A MODERN ARTIST. Using various mediums, create a
collage that comments on a particular theme or issue in the book.
6.
Write a review of the novel wherein you try to get someone else to read it.
7. Find THREE songs that seem to relate to your novel.
Write out the lyrics and then write an explanation of how they relate.
MAKE A CD of the songs.
8. Make a video tape or movie trailer about the book or part of the book.
9. WRITE poetry in response to the themes or for a character(s) of the book.
10. Create an imovie collage of images from a section of the book
11. Redesign the front and back cover of your novel.
Include the pertinent information as well as a blurb on the back.
12. Mandala
Create a
mandala with many levels to connect different aspects of a book, its historical
time, and culture.
13. FOUND POETRY.
Using words, phrases and sentences from newspapers or magazines create a
found poem expressing a theme of
the book.
13. Create your own original and creative assignment based on the novel.
Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Lecture
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html
William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Lecture
www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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