Introducing Lens Analysis

Lens Analysis: Interpretive and Intellectual Problems

Introducing Interpretive Problems in Lens Analysis

1. What makes this a working-class text OR what makes its status as a working-class text contentious?
2. How does the text problematize, exemplify, contradict, or contest a claim from Zandy?
   1. Summary of Zandy, which should include:
      1. Motive:
      2. Problem
      3. Claim:
      4. The criteria whose status you feel is especially significant in the context of categorizing this story.

3. Why is this significant? What do we learn about working-class literature by analyzing this text?

Example Lens Analysis Introductions

Example A

In his treatise The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most influential African American leaders of the early twentieth century, described the complicated effects racism had on Black selfhood. He introduces the term “double-consciousness” to describe the unique struggle for self-recognition experienced by Black folks. Double consciousness is the sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (8). He specifies that a Black person “[e]ver feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (8). Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness suggests that Black self-definition and expression is always determined by an outside party, raising the question of whether it’s possible to express oneself within white society.

Langston Hughes’s poem “Theme for English B,” written nearly fifty years after Du Bois’s essay, depicts one African American’s continued struggle with double-consciousness and the limitations race creates for the ability to be understood. However, where Du Bois sees double-consciousness as a painful condition he hopes will one day disappear, Hughes seems to have a more positive view, suggesting that mainstream Americans should also have an opportunity to experience this condition. Instead of eradicating double consciousness, Hughes seeks to universalize it. His poem suggests that true equality will be possible when all cultures are able to experience and appreciate double consciousness.

Example B

Depicting one student’s response to his professor’s request to introduce himself on paper, Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B” challenges our assumptions about the ability to express oneself authentically on the page, especially when we are writing across the color lines. Throughout the poem, Langston Hughes shuttles between the speaker and audience’s perspective to deliberately obscure our reading of whether or not this poem is a “true” expression of the speaker’s self. As we compare the shifts in apostrophe—the address of the speaker to an absent party—and volta—the rhetorical shifts in the poem, we can find that the speaker debates whether they are expressing themselves or expressing only the inability for them to express themselves. Using W.E.B Du Bois’s idea of “Double Consciousness,” we can look more closely at apostrophe and volta in the poem in order to determine that the poem is an authentic expression of how it feels to be Black in the university classroom.

In his treatise The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most influential African American leaders of the early twentieth century, described the complicated effects racism had on Black selfhood. He introduces the term “double-consciousness” to describe the unique struggle for self-recognition experienced by Black folks. Double consciousness is the sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (8). He specifies that a Black person “[e]ver feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (8). Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness suggests that Black self-definition and expression is always determined by an outside party, raising the question of whether its possible to express oneself within white society. Applied to Langston Hughes’s poem, Du Bois’s theory will help us understand how Hughes represents and reflects on how white institutions—like the university—construct race through the imposition of double consciousness.