Hi all! Unfortunately, this will be my last blog post for Beloved! To preface all of this, I’ve had a phenomenal time reading the book, and Toni Morrison still doesn’t cease to amaze me.
After spending some time thinking about what I had just read as well as discussing it with classmates, I presented myself with a question about Beloved. As I read this book as part of a free choice project for my AP English class, I decided to ask myself: is Beloved a book that should be read by AP , or is on par with other books read by AP classes? Well, to answer that question on a simple level, yes. But why? To start, Beloved is a very difficult book to comprehend, which in the end enhances proper reading skills. One major goal of an AP Literature course is to enhance a student’s ability to comprehend complex literature. Beloved is a perfect book to work on this task. Heck, I didn’t understand who Beloved actually was until I was three quarters of the way through the novel. I’m still very unclear on all of the motifs, but started to get an inkling as to what each one represented towards the end of the novel. This doesn’t show that I improved, but practicing the reading of complex literature in the end enhances the ability to comprehend it in the first place. Yes, Beloved is one of the most difficult novels I have ever read. Students should not read Beloved at the beginning of the year because of the complexity of the literature. I can note an improvement in my ability to comprehend complex literature since the beginning of the year, especially following the completion of Song of Solomon, another Toni Morrison novel. Beloved was the next challenge, and although I’ve described the text as one that is quite difficult to understand, that doesn’t remove the book from being AP worthy. If anything, the book is intellectually too advanced for high school students (not intending to sound condescending here, as I had a great deal of difficult with the content), and requires maybe a few more years of practice before the book can be appreciated for the true value. However, if a student has the capacity to understand the motifs and how they relate to the complex theme of escaping the literal sense of slavery, but never the social construct, the student clearly has understood the novel and has the capacity to write about Beloved on an AP Exam essay. Yes, Beloved is AP worthy!
Thank you one last time!
Dom
Good post Dom, you have a voice while writing that's nice to hear. Did you find Beloved to be more difficult to read than the Song of Solomon? Also, aside motifs, were there any prominent literary devices that made you think it had literary merit?
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