Instructions – PLEASE READ THEM CAREFULLY• The Assignment must b

Instructions – PLEASE READ THEM CAREFULLY
• The Assignment must be submitted on Blackboard (WORD
format only) via allocated folder.
Students are advised to make their work clear and well
presented; marks may be
reduced for poor presentation. This includes filling your
information on the cover page.
• Students must mention question number clearly in their
answer.
• Late submission will NOT be accepted.
• Avoid plagiarism, the work should be in your own words,
copying from students or
other resources without proper referencing will result in ZERO
marks. No exceptions.
• All answered must be typed using Times New Roman (size 12,
double-spaced) font.
No pictures containing text will be accepted and will be
considered plagiarism).
• Submissions without this cover page will NOT be accepted.
Course Learning Outcomes-Covered
1 Define the impact of company's culture, structure and design
can have on its organizational behavior. (CLO3)
Textbook:-
Colquitt, J. A., LePine, J. A., & Wesson, M. J. (2019).
Organizational behaviour: Improving performance and
commitment in the workplace (6th ed). Burr Ridge, IL:
McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Case Study: -
Case: Delta / United
1. 2.
Discussion questions: - Please read Chapter 16
“ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE” Carefully and then give your

answers based on your understanding.
Assignment 3
Reference Source:
Please read the case “Delta / United” from Chapter 16
“ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE” Page: - 533 given in your
textbook – Organizational behaviour: Improving performance
and commitment in the workplace (6th ed). by Colquitt, J. A.,
LePine, J. A., & Wesson, M. J. (2019) and Answer the
following Questions:
Assignment Question(s):
Why is an organization's culture perhaps the most evident
during crisis situations?
(1.25 Marks )
(Min words 100)
What causes companies like Delta and United to become so
different in regard to organizational
culture?
(1.25 Marks ) (Min words 150)
3. What will it take for United to overcome its culture that has
been built up over such a long period of time? (1.25 Marks )
(Min words 200)
Part:-2
4. Have you or a family member worked for an organization
that you would consider to have a strong
culture? If so, what made the culture strong? Did you or they
enjoy working there? What do you think
led to that conclusion?
(1.25 Marks ) (Min words 100)
Important Note: - Support your submission with course
material concepts, principles, and theories
from the textbook and at least two scholarly, peer-reviewed

journal articles.
The two essays titled "Salvation" by Langston Hughes and "A
good man is hard to find" by Flannery Connor, that you must
compare. Then the 4 sources you must use, and of course the
two stories as sources too. Making 6 sources, and sample of a
marked sources, and a details on how to write the essay is
attached.
So I need you to submit, the full Comparison essay, and off
course the 4 secondary sources ( 1 dictionary, 3 scholarly
literary analysis journal articles).
You then need to ‘mark’ the quotes you used in your research
paper directly on the PDF files (or Word documents). Highlight
the full text articles or use the PDF tool ‘sticky notes’ to
indicate the quotes you used in your paper. You will mark the
journal articles and save them with a proper filename. There are
‘sample’ marked sources posted in the document sharing list in
mywritinglab so you can view how these marked sources need
to be created.
In addition, your 4th source will be an online dictionary
definition of ‘outsider’, ‘outcast’, or ‘misfit’. Mark the specific
definition you plan to use in your research paper. A sample
marked dictionary definition is posted in the document sharing
list in mywritinglab.
Please note: you are only marking the four secondary sources (1
definition source and 3 scholarly literary analysis journal
articles). You are not marking the quotes in the two primary
sources (the two chosen readings from the approved six stories
for the research paper). Sample definition sources are posted in
the document sharing list in mywritinglab, as well as a ‘marked’
definition source.
this paper must include a typed Works Cited page with all six
required sources to receive full credit for the assignment
(minimum length of your rough draft - 1,500 typed words)

Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes's
"Montage of a Dream
Deferred"
Author(s): Bartholomew Brinkman
Source: African American Review , Spring/Summer 2011, Vol.
44, No. 1/2
(Spring/Summer 2011), pp. 85-96
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of
African American
Review (St. Louis University)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41328707
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/41328707
Bartholomew Brinkman
Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz:
Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred
Over critical the investigation past decade, into in a
proliferation the connections of scholarship between literature
paralleling and more jazz, scholars general critical investigation
into the connections between literature and jazz, scholars
have taken up the question of jazz and blues influence in the
poems of Langston
Hughes.1 Much of this scholarship has centered on Hughes's
most accomplished
poem sequence, his 1951 Montage of a Dream Deferred , in
which poems based on
everything from boogie-woogie to bebop are juxtaposed to
depict the dreams and
difficulties of a Harlem in transition. Considering these
approaches to Hughes's
poetic appropriation of African American musical forms, in
conjunction with a
surging critical interest in the intersection of modern poetry
and mass culture, it is
somewhat surprising that so litde attention has been given to
the various mecha-
nisms - the phonograph, the radio, and above all, the sound
film - through which
this music was often heard and which are so prominendy
depicted in Hughes's work.

This inattention to Hughes's fascination with the instruments of
mass culture
goes hand-in-hand with a general critical neglect of Hughes's
radical politics. When
treated at all, Hughes's radical commitments have often been
reduced to the prole-
tarian poetry of the 1 930s that has generally been taken as a
kind of hiccup - an
abrupt disruption and departure from issues of race and
community that most
concerned him in the 1920s and that he would return to in the
1940s and for the rest
of his career. Ryan Jerving, for example, places Hughes's jazz
poetry direcdy against
such commitments, arguing that Hughes's "early handling of
jazz - and his virtual
abandonment of it for almost two decades - bears the telltale
marks of an enter-
tainment industry form that could not be articulated confidendy
or without a certain
ambivalence to black identity or to anticapitalist critique until
after the Second World
War" (661).2
I want to suggest, however, that while Hughes does in his late
poems return to
jazz and blues, his handling of them is still very much caught
up in the ambivalence
and anticapitalist critique that had marked his radical poetry of
the 1930s. His insis-
tence on the authenticity of jazz as an African American art
form as well as a form
of social critique, most evident in his depiction of bebop in

Montage, is asserted
against the standardization of jazz by a (white) U. S. culture
industry, whose "most
powerful agent," Walter Benjamin reminds us, "is the film"
(221). Under this culture
industry, as Krin Gabbard has argued, the movies became a
powerful site for pro-
ducing a mythology of jazz - that "other history" of a
commercial music that is so
often neglected by scholars in favor of a few unusually talented
composers and per-
formers (1-2).
I will show how Hughes incorporates both jazz and film form
into his poems,
placing them in dialectical contention, to emphasize both the
music and one of its
most pervasive mediums. This dialectic is played out in a
number of discursive reg-
isters - oral/visual, black/white, embodiment/disembodiment,
sex/impotence, and
primitivism /progres s - that Hughes foregrounds in an attempt
to offer a specifically
black subjectivity that becomes a point of negotiation of mass
modernity as well as a
productive alternative to it.3 Formally, the poem itself becomes
a forum for staging
this dialectic and ultimately Hughes's poetry serves to help
articulate a point of
political resistance beyond the realm of the poem.
African American Review 44.1-2 (Spring/Summer 201 1): 85-
96
© 201 1 Bartholomew Brinkman 85

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Movies and Mass Modernity
From relationship the early with days film. of silent They
cinema, were, not African surprisingly, Americans generally
have caricatured had a complex and relationship with film. They
were, not surprisingly, generally caricatured and
ridiculed on the silver screen, often by white actors in
blackface. As a coherent audi-
ence to which films were actually aimed, African Americans
were generally ignored,
and as several scholars have pointed out, the very
standardization of a Classical
Hollywood style - with its emphasis on the invisible continuity
of image and sound -
was dependent on a stable notion of whiteness.4
While Hollywood reinforced the more general cultural
marginalization of African
Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, it also
presented an opportunity
for black filmmakers to not only direct "race films" to a black
audience, but to cor-
rect some racial misrepresentations in the process. To this end,
the Lincoln Motion
Picture Company was founded in 1915, with the goal of
presenting positive images
of African Americans, encouraging black pride without
disrupting the social order.
Shordy thereafter, the homesteader-novelist Oscar Micheaux

would begin to make
his own race films, becoming the most prolific African
American filmmaker of the
first half of the twentieth century. Micheaux's films, however,
were highly critical of
blacks who turned their backs on their race in an attempt to
enter the American
mainstream. As Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence have argued,
Micheaux's silent
films in particular "deflated the pretensions of the expanding
black middle class by
providing images of victimization and poverty too reminiscent
of racist portrayals
that were supposedly defining characteristics of the race and
the essence of the
African American condition" (6).
It is into this volatile mix of a dominant Hollywood, a race-
based rejoinder, and a
rogue radicalism that Hughes in midcareer - at about the same
time he came out from
under the influence of jazz and blues - expressed an interest in
film. As Phyllis
Klotman has explained, Hughes was one of several African
American authors who
attempted the transition to screenwriting in the 1930s.
Following the initial rejection
by Paramount of a film adaptation for his short story
"Rejuvenation through Joy,"
Hughes found some success with Way Down South. Though the
screenplay helped
Hughes financially, its stereotypical depiction of a plantation
setting felt to Hughes
like compromise, causing him some degree of embarrassment.
Feeling, perhaps,
that he was unlikely to circumvent this sense of compromise,

Hughes never seriously
pursued a career in film.
But the cinema would have a profound effect on Hughes's
poetry, influencing
both its subject matter and its form. Scattered references to the
movies can be found
throughout his oeuvre. Hughes's "Air Raid over Harlem," for
example, is subtided
"Scenario for a Little Black Movie." In "Note on a Commercial
Theatre," Hughes
criticizes filmic and other mass-cultural appropriation of
African American tradition.
In "Madam and the Movies," he suggests the failure of the
overly romanticized
movies to account for Madam's lonely life.
The phenomenon, however, is most closely explored in
Hughes's sequence
Montage of a Dream Deferred , which highlights film as a
mass-cultural form inattentive
to black experience. In "Shame on You," Hughes points to the
inability of Harlem
to integrate its racial history into its everyday entertainment:
A movie house in Harlem named after Lincoln,
Nothing at all named after John Brown.
Black people don't remember
any better than white. (11. 6-9)
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In choosing to name what is presumably a "race theater" movie
house after Abraham
Lincoln, a man who abolished slavery out of economic and
political necessity, rather
than John Brown who, though a white man, was committed to
black emancipation
and gave his life to the cause, blacks are as neglectful of a
history of black oppression
and resistance as whites are. The reference to Lincoln is also an
indictment of the
Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which - named after
Abraham Lincoln and
adopting his portrait as its logo - is itself guilty of glossing
over a tumultuous history
in its unproblematic representation of the African American
condition.
On one hand, the (mis)naming of a movie house is not very
different from the
other sin of the poem, forgetting those great and clever
contemporary blacks "[ejxcept
on holidays" ("Shame on You" 1. 5). On another, however, the
naming of a movie
house is of particular importance. It marks in the middle of
black Harlem a site
largely independent from dominant Hollywood culture, a
potential site for meaningful
black representation. Instead, however, it becomes just another
site of racial indif-
ference in which mass culture is consumed without regard to

historical memory.
In "Not a Movie" Hughes imagines this potential as he moves
from the site of
mass cultural production to the cultural product itself:
Well, they rocked him with road-apples
because he tried to vote
and whipped his head with clubs
and he crawled on his knees to his house
and he got the midnight train
and he crossed that Dixie line
now he's livin'
on a 133rd. (Q. 1-8)
A black man's attempt to escape north in order to get away
from the brutal oppres-
sion and racial violence of the KKK - a journey métonymie of
the Great Migration
itself - goes beyond the reach of Hollywood entertainment. In
this sense, these
experiences do not make a movie. They exist beyond what can
easily be represented
and received. In another sense, though, the scenes (each
stripped down to a line and
punctuated in succession with those "ands") are highly
cinematic and lend themselves
readily to filmic representation. Still, such representation, like
a film by Micheaux,
would be highly critical of filmmaker and audience and by
Hollywood entertainment
standards could hardly be called a movie.

Hughes is not only interested in the supply-side question of
what makes a movie,
however. On the demand side, he is also interested in how an
African American
audience responds to the movies as well as the political
potential in this response,
which I consider in the next section.
Laughing in the Wrong Places
As difficult Hughes for explains die Hollywood in "Movies,"
entertainment the restricted industry definition to connect of a
movie with the makes people it difficult for die Hollywood
entertainment industry to connect with the people
of Harlem:
The Roosevelt, Renaissance, Gem, Alhambra:
Harlem laughing in all the wrong places
at the crocodile tears
of crocodile art
that you know
in your heart
is crocodile:
MOVIES, MODERNITY, AND ALL THAT JAZZ: LANGSTON
HUGHES'S MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED 87
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(Hollywood
laughs at me,
black -
so I laugh
back.)
While Hughes does not make the subject of the poem explicit, a
likely candidate
would be one of those films such as The Ja ^ Singer or The
King of Ja ^ that either
portrayed jazz musicians in blackface or praised their white
imitators - one of those
films that openly mocked African Americans and their cultural
contribution.5 A
Harlem audience would understandably feel alienated by such
depictions of both
blacks and jazz, and would likely not have the same reactions
to the film that a
largely white audience might. The audience is left "laughing in
all the wrong places."
Laughing at unintended sites of cultural consumption - in
Harlem theaters aptly
named Roosevelt and Renaissance - and laughing at the wrong
points in the film.
This alienation has potentially profound formal and political
consequences. As
the film theorist Christian Metz has argued, the classical
cinematic viewing experience,
where the viewer is restrained in his seat, physically and

socially incapable of much
movement, and with eyes necessarily directed towards the
screen, is analogous to
the Lacanian mirror stage. In this instance, Metz claims, the
film is like a mirror and
the voyeur "is very careful to maintain a gulf, an empty space,
between the object
and the eye, the object and his own body: his look fastens the
object at the right dis-
tance, as with those cinema spectators who take care to avoid
being too close to or
too far from the screen" (421). Agency is minimized and one's
role in watching the
film is not unlike that of an assembly-line worker at the mercy
of a machine.
This is more than just an apt metaphor. As Mary Ann Doane
has argued, much
of the standardization and rationalization of time in the cinema
"can be linked to
changes in industrial organization and perceptions of an
affinity between the body
of the worker and the machine" (5). Doane goes on to claim
that the "pressure of
time's rationalization in the public sphere, and the
corresponding atomization that
ruptures the sense of time as exemplary continuum, produce a
discursive tension
that strikes many observers as being embodied in film form
itself" (9). The classical
film-viewing situation, then, stands in for a modern shock
experience seen as much
in the streets as on the factory floor. In this way, film indexes
anxieties about the
loss of subjectivity that are expressive of modern urban life

more generally and are
the hallmark of the culture industry itself.
As several critics have noted, however, Metz's description is an
ahistorical one
that ignores (among other things) the specificity of gender,
class, and race. With
respect to African American viewing situations in particular
(and these, too, should
not be homogenized), critics have suggested how an inability or
unwillingness to
identify with the subject matter on the screen, or the fact that
many audience mem-
bers are caught up in a self-aware viewing situation - brought
on by such things as
segregated theaters - denies the kind of art-house constraint
Metz outlines and pro-
motes a more dynamic and potentially more oppositional
reaction, often involving
interruption, talk-back, and laughing in the wrong places. As
Jacqueline Najuma
Stewart has argued, "Black viewers attempted to reconstitute
and assert themselves in
relation to the cinema's racist social and textual operations" as
a means of negotiating
an increasingly mobile and urban modernity like the one Doane
describes (94).
They enacted a "negotiated reception" that employed
"primitive" viewing habits -
meant to invoke the often condescending manner in which both
people of color
and pre-Classical cinema are treated - that should be
understood as a "multiply
determined, contradictory, modernist form of Black urban
performance" that
attempts to circumvent cinematic restraint (110). Similarly,

Manthia Diawara proposes
a kind of "resisting spectatorship" that allows black spectators
to contend with some
of white culture's most oppressive products and to productively
view such films as
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Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (212). bell hooks, among
others, has also considered
the conjunction of gender and race, arguing specifically for the
black female's
oppositional gaze.
Such negotiating and oppositional viewing strategies are
important not only for
the individual spectator and immediate viewing environment,
but potentially for the
larger culture industry as well. If, as Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer have
argued, the film (and the sound film in particular) is a potent
purveyor of the culture
industry that provides standardized entertainment as an alibi
for modern work and
the general condition of urban modernity - predictably
directing the audience as to
when they should cry and when they should laugh - the Harlem
audience, laughing

in all the wrong places, would seem to fall outside the reaches
of this industry. It
would, rather, potentially uncover the power of individual and
collective agency in
the face of cultural oppression that Walter Benjamin points to
in his oft-quoted
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction."
Against Adorno and Horkheimer's damning indictment of the
film industry,
Benjamin argues for film as an instrument of social action,
claiming that "[m]echanical
reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward
art. . . . With regard
to the screen, the critical and receptive attitudes of the public
coincide. The decisive
reason for this is that individual actions are predetermined by
the mass audience
response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more
pronounced than in
the film" (234). As opposed to Adorno and Horkheimer, who
see film (and mass
culture in general) as a top-down process, determined by an
industry of producers
who ensure a hegemonic response, Benjamin recognizes a
greater potential for
negotiation and action. The animating impulse is at the point of
reception and
those groups - such as black moviegoers in Harlem - who
receive a cultural product
in a way other than the way it was intended by the culture
industry, potentially occupy
a site of critical resistance that allows for a negotiation and
rearticulation of mass
culture to other (possibly subversive) aims. Harlem becomes

one of the last bastions
of resistance, not only for African Americans, but for the
American public and the
modern individual more generally. While the audience lacks the
capital and the
social clout to change Hollywood's racism and alienation of
African Americans, it
can - precisely because of this alienation - recognize the
movie's constructedness,
and with this recognition, can also challenge the culture
industry's hegemony.
In this context, laughter is a powerful affective response - all
the more so
because it isn't scripted. What at first appears to be a
misunderstanding of the rules of
the game, or an inability to suspend disbelief, becomes a
powerful critical position.
At the same time, however, laughter in itself is a rather weak
display of resistance,
offering litde in the way of action. It does, however, in its
recognition of crocodile
tears and crocodile art, open up a space for more authentic
expression (often taking
place at the same theatrical sites), which, in turn, holds out the
possibility of revolu-
tionary action. As I will suggest in the next section, Hughes
and many around him
saw this authentic expression in bebop jazz.
Bebop, Rebop, and the Art of Jazz
Hughes Dream explains Deferred : his bebop influence in his
introductory note to Montage of a Dream Deferred :
In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the
sources from which it has

progressed - jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and
be-bop - this poem on
contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting
changes, sudden nuances,
sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages
sometimes in the manner
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of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by
the riffs, runs, breaks, and
disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition. (387)
In addition to outlining crucial elements of his poetic technique
(to which I will
return shordy), Hughes forwards in this note a definition of
bebop music itself: it's
black, it's popular, it's historical, it's urban; it is, as Ralph
Ellison put it, "a momentous
modulation into a new key of musical sensibility - in brief a
revolution in culture"
(448). This definition of bebop that informs Hughes's sequence
can be starkly
Just as Adorno acknowledges that popular jazz is most
powerfully experienced through the medium of the

sound film, we can in another turn of the dialectic read
this against the critical capacity that Benjamin
attributed to the film audience and which
Hughes locates specifically in Harlem.
contrasted with the culture industry's mass dissemination of
canned jazz. That is to
say, the kind of jazz Adorno had in mind when he wrote in his
infamous 1936 essay
"On Jazz," that:
The capital power of the publishers, its dissemination through
radio and above all, the
sound film have cultivated a tendency toward centralization
which limits freedom of choice
and barely allows for any real competition. . . . The pieces that
play a decisive role in the
broad social appeal of jazz are precisely not those which most
purely express the idea of jazz
as interference, but are, rather, technically backward, boorish
dances which only contain
mere fragments of these elements. These are regarded as
commercial. (475)
While Adorno 's essay has been attacked by jazz scholars on
multiple grounds (it
neglects the most artistically innovative American performers
in favor of bad
European knockoffs, it highlights Adorno 's distaste for jazz, it
takes race out of the
equation altogether), it is important to read it for what it is, a
fairly accurate depiction
of what most people most of the time were listening to: bad
jazz.6 With this under-

standing, Adorno's conception of jazz can be seen as very much
in line with his
conception of film outlined above: as another mass distraction
designed to placate
capitalism's victims.
With this general reading of mass distraction in mind, the essay
can, as Susan
Buck-Morss has pointed out, be read dialectically against
Benjamin's "The Work of
Art" essay. Adorno saw his essay as the critical answer to
Benjamin's affirmation of
film; at the same time Benjamin applauded Adorno's essay as
illuminating his subject
from the other side (148-49). I want to push this observation a
bit further to suggest
that jazz and film are not simply random examples of mass
culture through which
Benjamin's and Adorno's more abstract arguments could be
made, but that jazz and
film can themselves be read dialectically. Just as Adorno
acknowledges that popular
jazz is most powerfully experienced through the medium of the
sound film, we can
in another turn of the dialectic read this against the critical
capacity that Benjamin
attributed to the film audience and which Hughes locates
specifically in Harlem.
That is to say, just as the audience holds the capacity to be
critical of the film in
general, it is also potentially critical of the jazz which is
conveyed by and which helps
to structure the film. But while audience members lack the
capacity to offer up
another film in its place, many of them can make another jazz.

Bebop is the supreme example of this jazz. It resists being co-
opted by the
culture industry and the jazz film, and offers a way of scaling
what Hughes saw in
his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" as
the racial mountain
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"standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this
urge within the race
toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into
the mold of American
standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much
American as possible" (32).
There is no longer the same need to make individual black
experience fit mass
American culture. Black experience is American culture. Bebop
simply breaks the
mold to become the new authentic American music and if
whites attempt to play it,
they will be the imitators. As Simple simply says, "Re-Bop was
an imitation like
most of the white boys play. Be-Bop is the real thing like the
colored boys play"
(Hughes, "Bop" 177-78). Bop has its pop not only because it
functions outside of
and against the official structures of the culture industry, but

because its very form
refuses to be co-opted and standardized. As I will suggest in
the next section, the
same can be said for Hughes's poetry, which juxtaposes the
forms of jazz and film
while at the same time resisting imitation.
Jazz, Film, and a Dialectical Poetics
Hughes's it formally Montage embodies does not these simply
phenomena. function While as discourse a number about of jazz
scholars and film; have it formally embodies these phenomena.
While a number of scholars have
pointed to Hughes's use of jazz and blues forms in the
sequence, few have considered
his appropriation of film even if the tide begs for such
consideration. A notable
exception is Daniel C. Turner, who has argued that Hughes's
sequence relies on
pictorial montage and jazz performance as complex framing
devices. "Hughes," he
writes, "offers us a musical montage, in which hearing is made
equivalent to seeing"
(25). Turner asserts that this blending of sound and vision
"signals the integration
of a modernism practiced by predominately black artists (jazz)
and one practiced by
predominately white artists (modernist poetry)" (28).
I wish to complicate Turner's explication, however, by arguing
that Montage is
not merely the intermingling or conflation of sound and image,
but a reenactment
of the film/ jazz dialectic that poses a continuous deferral of
lyric subjectivity and a
possible overcoming of it through the poetic form itself. Just as

the montage elements
of the poem enact scenic deferrals, bebop makes connections
across scenes; just as
montage disembodies, bebop brings back the body. Formally,
both film and jazz are
transcribed into Hughes's poetics, which offers a space where
the two can be placed
in dialectical contention and - in its appeal to both the visual
and the oral - suggests
a final, though deferred, synthesis.
Brent Edwards has argued for such a "poetics of transcription"
in which "the
form of a poem ... is able to suggest or mimic the form of a
particular music" (584).
Edwards recognizes that since the time of the Renaissance
there has been a shift in
the poetic lyric from melos (to be sung) to opsis (a pictorial
representation of signs on
the page), so that the poem itself is a closed, static object
(582). This leads to his
specific explanation of Hughes's blues poetry, a claim that it
"demands to be con-
sidered as much a formal transcription of a performance ... as a
score to be realized.
Perhaps the power of the blues poem as a form is intimately
linked to the fact that
we are not offered a realization; the performance setting and
musical backdrop are
absent or unavailable" (585). In suggesting that the text is cut
off from musical
performance, Edwards would seem to uphold the notion of the
auratic performance
as an originary ritual scene that cannot be accessed but only
indexed by the poem.

In Montage , however, we are not directed to originary scenes
of action. Rather,
we get transcriptions of scenes that mediate performance in
much the same way
film mediates mass jazz. Like film, these scenes are often
dependent on the visual,
��98.194.222.85 on Wed, 24 Nov 2021
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as in the conclusion to "New Yorkers": "She lifted up her lips /
in the dark: / The
same old spark!" (11. 15-17), or "Neon Signs," a poem that
depends on typography
and placement on the page, so that it must be seen as much as
read. Poems specifi-
cally about jazz performance, such as "Flatted Fifths," are
mediated by the visual as
well, where "[l]itde cullud boys" would "at a sudden change"
turn to "sparkling
Oriental wines / rich and strange / silken bathrobes with gold
twines" (11. 1,6, 7-9).
On a more global level, individual poems are placed against
one another to achieve a
montage effect, where illuminated frames are placed in rapid
succession and mediated
by the white space of the page, just as filmic images are
mediated by the darkness

of the closed shutter, giving the illusion of movement.
As such, montage is a dynamic metaphor for black/white
relations. Just as black
print is set against the white of the page and is mediated by
white space, black identity
is necessarily set against white experience and is mediated by a
white culture industry.
Montage attempts to make connections across poems, bridging
scenes and making
black experience immediate. But this does not mean that
everything goes grey.
Rather, black and white retain their designations but are
brought intimately together,
as illustrated in "Subway Rush Hour":
Mingled
breath and smell
so close
mingled
black and white
so near
no room for fear.
Breath and smell, production and reception, are so juxtaposed
as to be nearly indis-
tinguishable. The two actions, like the mingling of black and
white itself, cannot be
reduced to a third term. As in cinematic montage, there is a
continual deferral of
synthesis in the black/white dialectic.

This montage-logic is embedded in the reading experience
itself. To consider only
the filmic elements of the sequence, the reader would seem to
be constrained by
and drawn into the driving succession of poems, just as Metz's
film viewer is drawn
into the succession of images reeling before him. As we have
seen, however, the
African American viewing experience potentially offers a
means of negotiating and
resisting this montage-logic as it interrupts the succession of
scenes, supplements
images with live sound and other theatrical embellishments,
and dwells on particular
moments in the film. In much the same way, Hughes provides
formal points of
resistance in the reading of Montage , complicating a
straightforward, linear narrative
that moves from poem to poem in easy succession.
As such, Hughes challenges the recent critical understanding of
how filmic ele-
ments are integrated into what Turner points to as a
predominately white modernist
poetry. As Susan McCabe has argued, modern poets were
confronted with a central
modernist paradox: "a desire to include bodily experience and
sensation along with
an overpowering sense of the unavailability of such experience
except as mediated
through mechanical production" (3). She goes on to suggest
that modern poetry
and film share a concern for hysteria brought on by the
repetitions and dissociations
of modernity, so that "the hysterical body was not simply a
figure depicted in the

modernist poem or film, but more provocatively, coincided
with the fragmented
and dissociated bodies created as montage" (5). This results in
a "phenomenology
of fragmentation," in which cinematic bodies "haunt, permeate,
fragment and are
fragmented by representation" (7).
While Hughes shares anxieties about film with Pound, Eliot, H.
D., and the other
modernist poets that McCabe identifies, he also offers a way
out of this hysteria,
this disembodiment, this loss of subjectivity to mechanical
reproduction and the
��98.194.222.85 on Wed, 24 Nov 2021
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culture industry. Hughes challenges the phenomenology of
fragmentation by
encouraging a resistant reading of Montage that parallels
African American resistant
viewing. In doing so, he promotes a sense of unity that
overcomes fragmentation.
But rather than a personal, phenomenal self-unity, this is a
social sense of collective
unity: unity of individual viewers in the theater; unity of poems
in the sequence;
and, most radically, unity of readers together reading the

sequence. Through his
encouragement of collective reading practices, Hughes
challenges the individual,
internalized scenes of reading that have characterized
discussions of modern poetry.
The resistance to serial succession also opens up the possibility
for reading across
poems, which in Montage is best characterized by the turn to
bebop. The shared images,
tropes, words, and voices of the poems come together (as
Hughes explains in his
introductory note) in conflicting changes, broken rhythms,
sharp nuances, and inter-
jections. These bebop "changes" threaten the lyric stability and
cohesion of many
of the individual poems - the form privileged by strategies of
close reading that
treat the poem as a discrete, coherent object - but take on great
significance as the
poems are read together. The poem's transcription and
verbalization of bop allows
Montage to move from a critical gesture to an affirmative one,
recouping its loss of
a private, lyrical subjectivity and instituting in its place a
communal one.
Though the full meaning of the sequence as a whole cannot be
grasped by
reading poems in isolation, they are nonetheless important for
punctuating particular
scenes in Montage in a way that one long, continuous poem
could not. There is also,
just as in a jazz performance, a forward momentum to the
sequence that is dependent
on the ordering of the poems. I do not, then, mean to argue for

the bebop elements
of the sequence over the cinematic ones. Rather, I am
suggesting that Hughes's
sequence enacts a formal deferral through montage while at the
same time invoking
a jazz that cuts across juxtaposed moments to answer that
deferral. The sequence
refuses to resolve this dialectic of film and jazz but
continuously plays it out with
each reading of the poem, so that the individual reader
articulates its message in
performance, even as he or she moves on, leaving behind the
husks of words on
the page. As I will argue in the final section, this places the
reader in a position of
connection and disjunction, both to herself and to her
community, so that this
dialectic is articulated on a political level as a dream and the
deferral of that dream.
Dream . . . Deferral
Bebop and '50s has as often a music been that identified
signaled with and black represented militant revolution
movements or of rebellion. the 1 940s As and '50s as a music
that signaled and represented revolution or rebellion. As
Eric Lott has suggested, "bebop was intimately if indirectly
related to the militancy
of its moment. Militancy and music were undergirded by the
same social facts; the
music attempted to resolve at the level of style what the
militancy fought out in the
streets" (459). With specific reference to Hughes and his
appropriation of this
bebop style, John Lowney has argued for "the significance of
bebop in Montage for

reclaiming Harlem as a site for both black cultural pride and
militant anger, a site of
memory that recalls the Utopian promise of the Harlem
Renaissance but also
appeals to the postwar skepticism of a younger generation of
black artists" (358).
In this vein, I want to suggest that bebop holds out - through an
immediate,
embodied identification of musician, listener, and music - a
possible resolution of
subject and object that can serve as a template for the
proletariat's recognition of
itself as the subject and object of history, so that class
consciousness in general can
be understood as stemming from a particular black praxis.
Bebop brings about a
way of enacting the dream that has haunted Hughes since his
earliest poems.7
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Such a possibility is already evident in the first poem of
Montage , "Dream Boogie."
The poem (and the sequence as a whole) opens with a
traditional ballad stanza, a-b-a-b
rhyme scheme, in which we are introduced to a "boogie-woogie
rumble / Of a dream

deferred" (11. 3-4). Music is accompanied by the movement of
"feet" that are "beating"
out both poetic rhythm and potential militant violence (11. 6-
7). It is not a happy beat.
As a rumble, this is subtextual, under the radar, "something
underneath" (1. 12). But
just as we are presented with this possibility, we are told in
both a musical and a lit-
eral sense to "Take it away!" (1. 17). The meter and rhyme
begin to break down; the
stanza is cut off with an italicized interruption, a break in the
rhythm. In the third
stanza it breaks again. The poem turns into a dialogic interplay
of roman and itali-
cized voices - of questions and answers - and while the fourth
stanza seems to
return to the pattern of the first, the two words, in accordance
with the established
metrical and rhyme scheme, which would seem to be deferred,
are precisely "dream
deferred" (1. 4). But even here there is a holding out, a final
striving for affirmation:
"Y-e-a-h!" (1. 21).
The poem presents the dream and the dream deferral, the
invocation of the
primitive in the face of the progressive, and the very question
of resistance as it
would come to dominate the sequence. But to realize the call to
action demands a
coming to terms with history. Harlem is itself important for
this history. Film, jazz,
and the Harlem theaters in which both were presented were not
only key sites for
collective action, but also for re-presenting the past and coming
to grips with historical

memory that in ways may be crippling but also potentially
liberating. Montage, , a poetic
sequence set in Harlem, has likewise become a part of that
history, extending and
challenging the lessons of the past, itself becoming a cultural
product to be learned
from and challenged.
History is also represented throughout the sequence by the
trope "daddy," which
functions not only as slang, but also as a stand-in for
masculinized black tradition
and a connection to the primitive.8 As David Chinitz has
argued, Hughes's rejection
of his early primitivism was never complete because he didn't
give up his association
of African American music with primitivism. Chinitz claims,
with specific reference to
Hughes's story "Rejuvenation through Joy," that "Hughes
continues to believe, at times
almost mystically, that jazz expresses and addresses a realm of
the human psyche
that Western civilization had suppressed; that the African
American retains easier and
more immediate access to this spirit; and that implicit within
jazz is an alternative
mode of being" (69-70). This primitivism - which, as we have
seen, has also been
used to characterize the black oppositional viewing experience
- can be read against
Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that mankind, "whose
versatility and knowledge
become differentiated with the division of labor, is at the same
time forced back to
anthropologically more primitive stages, for which the
technical easing of life the

persistence of domination brings about a fixation of the
instincts by means of
heavier repression. . . . The curse of irresistible progress is
irresistible regression"
(35-36). While an appeal to the Adornian primitive is on the
one hand regressive,
it can also be understood as resistance to the onslaught of mass
modernity, and in
this way holds out a Utopian end to revolution that coincides
with what several critics
have recognized as the sequence's foregrounding of religion.
To conclude, then: the contrasting expressions of jazz and film,
as well as their
curious co-mingling in such places as the jazz film, are key for
understanding
Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred. Through its
enactment of a contin-
uous and unresolved film/ jazz dialectic, the sequence presents
a succession of
punctuated lyrical moments that are augmented and challenged
by the talk-back and
crossover of bop. This structuring of the sequence i s a formal
working-through of
the larger social dialectic of film and jazz, characterized by an
African American
opposition to the white culture industry and the resulting
possibility of a black
artistic affirmation. This critical resistance and creative
production in turn allows
��98.194.222.85 on Wed, 24 Nov 2021
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for the possibility of political resistance and revolutionary
action. Action, however,
is ultimately left to the readers, who must collectively interpret
and act upon the
lessons of Montage , so that its liberating message is no longer
a dream deferred.
1 . The origins of current interest in Hughes's jazz and blues
poetry can most readily be traced to Steven C.
Tracy's Langston Hughes and the Blues (Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 1988). Also see Chinitz; Anita Patterson,
"Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of
Langston Hughes," Modern Language Quarterly
61.4 (December 2000): 651-82; Lowney; Michael Borshuk,
"Noisy Modernism: The Cultural Politics of
Langston Hughes's Early Jazz Poetry," Langston Hughes
Review 17.1-2 (2002): 4-22.; and Jerving. Tidwell and
Ragar's edited collection, Montage of a Dream: The Art and
Life of Langston Hughes , has furthered this interest
in the blues with Steven C. Tracy, "Langston Hughes and Aunt
Hager's Children's Blues Performance:
'Six-Bits Blues,' " in Tidwell and Ragar 19-31, and Trudier
Harris, "Almost - But Not Quite - Bluesmen
in Langston Hughes's Poetry," in Tidwell and Ragar 32-38.
2. This neglect, however, has not been absolute. William J.
Maxwell has emphasized Hughes's ties with
communism in pointing to more widespread connections
between the Harlem Renaissance and the

American Left. James Smethurst has focused his attention on
Hughes's much-neglected poems of the 1930s.
More recently, Robert Young has made a claim for Hughes's
"red" poetics, that Hughes's understanding of
Marxism and of the base/superstructure dialectic is formally
apparent in his poems. He has also attempted
to push Hughes's socialist sympathies back to Hughes's youth
and argues that his 1920s poems of racial
oppression can be read as a specific manifestation of a more
general economic concern. See Maxwell,
New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and
Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia UP,
1999); Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and
African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (New York:
Oxford UP, 1999); Young, "Langston Hughes's 'Red' Poetics,"
Langston Hughes Review 18 (Fall 2004):
16-21; and Young, "Langston Hughes's Red Poetics and the
Practice of 'Disalienation,' " in Tidwell and
Ragar 135-46.
3. My use of the term dialectic properly refers to a negative
dialectics, as conceived of by Benjamin and
articulated by Adorno. As Jameson puts it in Marxism and
Form , "a negative dialectic has no choice but
to affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis, while
negating its possibility and reality in every
concrete case that comes before it" (56).
4. For more on the connection between Classical Hollywood
and whiteness, see Classic Hollywood,
Classic Whiteness , Daniel Bernardi, ed. (Minneapolis: U of
Minneapolis P, 2001).
5. Gabbard has commented on these films in Jammin' at the

Margins, as has Michael Rogin in Blackface,
White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1996); Arthur Knight
in Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and
American Musical Film (Durham: Duke UP, 2002); and
Ryan Jerving in "Jazz Language and Ethnic Novelty,"
Modernism /modernity 10.2 (April 2003): 239-68.
6. This was a jazz characterized by what Jerving has seen as a
"Fordist relentless regularity of dance-ready
rhythm, a Taylorist efficiency in the arrangement of musicians
and sounds" characteristic of such band
leaders as the aptly named Paul Whiteman (652).
7. Several of these poems, such as "Dreams," "Dream
Variations," and "The Dream Keeper," deal
explicitly with the possibilities and difficulties of the dream.
8. For example, in "Dead in There," one of the deceased
purveyors of jazz is seen as "a cool bop daddy"
(1. 5). Further, the phrase "Good morning, daddy!" is repeated
in the opening of "Good Morning," a poem
which recalls the making of Harlem, where "colored folks
spread / from river to river," pouring out of the
great migration until they formed a "dusky sash across
Manhattan" (11. 4-5, 16).
Adorno, Theodor W. "On Jazz." 1936. Essays on Music. Ed.
Richard D. Leppert. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. 470-95.
- , and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944.
Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum,
2001.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction." 1936. Illuminations.
Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217-52.
Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence. "Oscar Micheaux's Body
and Soul and the Burden of Representation."
Cinema Journal 39.3 (Spring 2000): 3-29.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics:
Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt
Institute. New York: Free, 1977.
HUGHES'S MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED
Notes
Works
Cited
95
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Chinitz, David. "Rejuvenation through Joy: Langston Hughes,
Primitivism and Jazz." American Literature
9.1 (Spring 1997): 60-78.

Diawara, Manthia. "Black Spectatorship: Problems of
Identification and Resistance." Diawara, Black
American Cinema 21 1-20.
- , ed. Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2002.
Edwards, Brent. "The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form:
James Weldon Johnson's Prefaces."
O'Meally 580-601.
Ellison, Ralph. "The Golden Age, Time Past." O'Meally 448-
56.
Gabbard, Krin. Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American
Cinema. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
hooks, bell. "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female
Spectators." Diawara, Black American Cinema 288-302.
Hughes, Langston. "Bop." 1961. Writing Jazz. Ed. David
Meitzer. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1999.
177-78.
- . The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 3: The
Poems, 1951-1967. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. Columbia:
U of Missouri P, 2001.
- . "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." 1926. The
Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9:
Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs. Ed. Arnold
Rampersad. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002.
31-36.
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century
Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1974.
Jerving, Ryan. "Early Jazz Literature (And Why You Didn't
Know)." American Literary History 16.4
(Winter 2004): 648-74.
Klotman, Phyllis. "The Black Writer in Hollywood, Circa 1930:
The Case of Wallace Thurman."
Diawara, Black American Cinema 80-92.
Lowney, John. "Langston Hughes and the 'Nonsense' of
Bebop." American Literature 72.2 (June 2000):
357-85.
Lott, Eric. Double V, Double Time: Bebop s Politics of Style.
О Meally 457-68.
McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and
Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Metz, Christian. "The Imaginary Signifier." Film and Theory:
An Anthology. Eds. Robert Stam and Toby
Miller. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. 408-36.
O'Meally, Robert G., ed. The Jazz Cadence of America. New
York: Columbia UP, 1998.
Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema
and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: U of
California P, 2005.
Tidwell, John Edgar, and Cheryl R. Ragar, eds. Montage of a
Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes.
Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2007.
Turner, Daniel C. "Montage of a Simplicity Deferred: Langston
Hughes's Art of Sophistication and Racial
Intersubjectivity in Montage of a Dream Deferred ." Langston

Hughes Review 17 (Fall-Spring 2002): 22-34.
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Contentsp. 85p. 86p. 87p. 88p. 89p. 90p. 91p. 92p. 93p. 94p.
95p. 96Issue Table of ContentsAfrican American Review, Vol.
44, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2011) pp. 1-329Front
MatterForgotten Manuscripts: A Trip to Coontown [pp. 7-
24]Elizabeth Keckley's "Behind the Scenes"; or, the "Colored
Historian's" Resistance to the Technologies of Power in Postwar
America [pp. 25-48]Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton's Old
New York [pp. 49-66]There is Heterosexuality: Jessie Fauset,
W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Problem of Desire [pp. 67-
83]Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes's
"Montage of a Dream Deferred" [pp. 85-96]Out of the Black
Past: The Image of the Fugitive Slave in Jacques Tourneur's
"Out of the Past" [pp. 97-113]Circling Meaning in Toni
Morrison's "Sula" [pp. 115-129]"Trying to find a place when the
streets don't go there": Fatherhood, Family, and American
Racial Politics in Toni Morrison's "Love" [pp. 131-147]"Belated
Impress": "River George" and the African American Shell
Shock Narrative [pp. 149-166]Duplicities of Power: Amiri
Baraka's and Lorenzo Thomas's Responses to September 11 [pp.
167-180]AILERONS &ELEVATORS [pp. 181-183]Ralph
Ellison's Righteous Riffs: Jazz, Democracy, and the Sacred [pp.
185-206]Mary Turner's Blues [pp. 207-220]No Name in the
South: James Baldwin and the Monuments of Identity [pp. 221-
234]What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity and
Queer Childrearing in "Lackawanna Blues" ana "Noah's Arc"
[pp. 235-253]PoetryMy hand [pp. 255-255]Migration Story [pp.
255-255]Percival Road [pp. 256-256]Communion [pp. 256-

256]West 148th St. Canvas [pp. 256-257]What to say, but [pp.
257-257]Night in Limestone County [pp. 258-258]Hagar's
Fever, A Lament [pp. 259-260]Alice Paints the Moon Mad [pp.
260-261]La Tête du Soleil [pp. 261-262]Janie Talkin' In Her
Sleep [pp. 262-263]Guitar Soliloquy [pp. 263-264]Celie's
Notes: Dear God [pp. 264-265]When There Is a Birth or
Regeneration [pp. 266-266]Harmattan [pp. 267-268]The Virgin
in the Yard [pp. 269-269]My Mother's Hands [pp. 270-270]We
Got That Swing [pp. 270-270]FictionThe Monarch across the
Street [pp. 271-278]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 279-
280]Review: untitled [pp. 280-283]Review: untitled [pp. 283-
322]Review: untitled [pp. 323-325]Back Matter
outsider
[out-sahy-der] Origin
The Outsiders
Puzzles, quizzes, and more in this literature unit for teachers.
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out·sid·er
ˌaʊtˈsaɪ dərShow Spelled[out-sahy-der] Show IPA
noun
1.
a person not belonging to a particular group, set, party, etc.:
Society often
regards the artist as an outsider.
2.
a person unconnected or unacquainted with the matter in
question: Not being
a parent, I was regarded as an outsider.
3.
a racehorse, sports team, or other competitor not considered
likely to win or
succeed.
4.
a person or thing not within an enclosure, boundary, etc.
Origin: 1790–1800; outside+ -er1
:10:09:08:07:06:05:04:03:02:01Outsider is always a great word
to know.
So is slumgullion. Does it mean:

a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.
a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.
a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.
a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.
a fool or simpleton; ninny.
the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.
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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc.
2011.
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Collins
World English Dictionary
outsider(ˌaʊtˈsaɪdə)
—n
1. a person or thing excluded from or not a member of a set,
group, etc
2. a contestant, esp a horse, thought unlikely to win in a race
3. (Canadian) (in the north) a person who does not live in the
Arctic
regions
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th
Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 ©
HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source
Etymonline
Word Origin & History
outsider
1800, from outside; figurative sense of "a person isolated from
conventional
society" is first recorded 1907. The sense of race horses
"outside" the

favorites is from 1836; hence outside chance (1909).
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
Cite This Source
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The Evolution of a Good Woman
Author(s): Laura Mandell Zaidman
Source: The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin , 1998-2000, Vol.
26/27 (1998-2000), pp. 43-51
Published by: Board of Regents of the University System by and
on behalf of Georgia
College and State University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/26674744
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Bulletin
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http://www.jstor.com/stable/26674744
Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 43
Laura Mandell Zaidman
The Evolution of a Good Woman
In a letter to John Hawkes of 14 April 1960, Flannery O'Connor
complimented his students' grasp of her Catholic way of
thinking in "A
Good Man Is Hard to Find"—the grandmother "is not pure evil
and may
be a medium for Grace." Perhaps because Hawkes did not teach

in the
South, O'Connor did not attribute the students' perceptiveness
to their
all having grandmothers who, like her character, "exactly
reflect the
banalities of the society"; nonetheless, the students surmised
that "the
effect is of the comical rather than the seriously evil." Contrary
to the
Protestant perspective, the Catholic viewpoint would allow the
old
lady to be a medium of grace precisely because she is
"imperfect,
purely human, and even hypocritical" (HB 389).
In fact, this most famous O'Connor story succeeds because it
shows that the most culpable human beings may be the most
ready for
conversion. At the story's conclusion, the reader wonders
whether The
Misfit will transcend being Christ-haunted to being saved, for
this
sinner expresses the truth of the grandmother's imperfect life
with grim
humor: "She would of been a good woman [. . .] if it had been
somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (CS 133).
An

analysis of several drafts of the story proves that O'Connor
constructed
the grandmother in stages, revising the characterization from a
woman
desperately in need of God's grace to a medium of grace for
The Misfit.
O'Connor "wrote by rewriting," yet tracing the stages of
extensive
rewriting is impossible because O'Connor destroyed work she
did not
want read (Driggers ix). The only extant working draft for "A
Good
Man Is Hard to Find" in the O'Connor Collection at Georgia
College &
State University consists of two photocopied pages (numbered
2 and 3
in the upper left corner).* The collection also has The Avon
Book of
Modern Writing (1953), a thirty-five-cent paperback anthology
pub
lished by the editors of Partisan Review. The cover describes
the book
as a "collection of original contributions by today's leading
writers."

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44 The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin
O'Connor wrote Sally and Robert Fitzgerald on 7 June 1953
that she
"sold 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' to the Partisan Review
Reader,
another of those [fifty-cent] jobs" (HB 59), but she does not
offer any
further comment. Because the O'Connor Collection does not
contain
working drafts of the manuscript, the contrast between the two-
page
fragment and the completed versions seems all the more
striking.
Analyzing the evolution of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" from
fragmentary draft to inclusion in the Avon collection to
O'Connor's
own collection and then into reprints, the reader is struck by
the
epigraph in the collection Three by Flannery O 'Connor (1962):
"'The

dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass.
Beware lest
he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary
to pass
by the dragon.'—St. Cyril of Jerusalem." This quotation,
attributed to
the fourth-century Catholic bishop, curiously does not appear
in any
earlier publication of the story. Nevertheless, it serves as a
splendid
metaphor for the concept of evil lurking along the road of life,
as
embodied in The Misfit. As O'Connor explains to Hawkes, "His
shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness, but after he
has done
it and cleaned his glasses, the Grace has worked in him and he
pronounces his judgment: she would have been a good woman
if he had
been there every moment of her life. True enough" (HB 389).
The
writer herself thus makes it absolutely clear that she considers
the
grandmother to have been a good woman at the end of her life.
The
reader can infer from this act of grace that it will be hard to
find the

good man in The Misfit as he struggles to know and find
Christ.
The process of constructing the grandmother must have
involved
countless destroyed revisions. Tracing the evolution of the
story starts
with the undated fragmentary draft. The two-page (thirty-eight
typed
lines) manuscript begins, "The grandmother was the first one [.
. .]."
This opening became the tenth paragraph in the 1955 version:
"The
next morning grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to
go" (CS
118). The fragmentary text also has a few handwritten changes.
For
instance, O'Connor marked out "valise" in favor of "grip," but
returned
to "valise" in paragraph ten in the 1955 version.
Among the many differences between the early and final
versions
are those of characterization. Initially, O'Connor named Bailey
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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 45
"Boatwrite" and made him much more aggressive than the
emotionally
distanced son who will not even look up from his reading to
answer his
mother in the second paragraph of the final version. In the
early draft
fragment Boatwrite curses at Baby Brother, "Why the hell did
you
bring that goddam rocking horse?" Then, his older son, John
Wesley,
imitates his father by yelling in response to Grandma's
comment that
Tennessee is a beautiful state, "Like hell [...]. That's just a
hillbilly
dumping ground." Perhaps O'Connor considered the name
Boatwrite
to suggest how the father should keep the family boat aright,
not
rudderless, but her choice of Bailey is another stroke of genius.
As my
student Renae Martin has observed in her model student paper,

"Sin
and Punishment According to Flannery O'Connor," bailey is a
castle's
outer wall meant to ward off potential attackers, and Bailey has
surrounded himself emotionally with a wall to block out his
mother's
nagging and manipulation. Unfortunately, when his family is
about to
be murdered, he can do nothing to protect them or himself
(Martin 111
12). O'Connor's revisions made the son totally powerless; for a
man
who wears a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots, he is not
much of a
talker.
Interestingly, Boatwrite's mother is called "Granny" or
"Grandma,"
connoting a warmer, more lovable woman than "the
grandmother."
Furthermore, in this fragment it is Boatwrite's wife, not his
mother,
who appears ridiculously, fastidiously dressed for the family
vacation.
His wife wears a purple silk dress, a hat, a choker of pink
beads, and

red high-heel pumps. However, in the final version, she is
described
as "a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and
innocent as
a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that
had two
points on the top like a rabbit's ears" (CS 117). To make the
contrast
between the mother and grandmother even more dramatic,
O'Connor
puts the two in the same sentence in the final version:
The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head
tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy
blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim
and
a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her
collars
and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her
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46 The F tannery O'Connor Bulletin

neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets
containing
a sachet. (CS 118)
Thus, O'Connor has reworked the characterization of the grand
mother in this final version, making her the one obsessed with
the
appearances of fashion—banal, superficial, and all too human.
The
final version adds this line of dead-on irony: "In case of an
accident,
anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once
that she
was a lady" (CS 118). Ironically, an accident does occur, and
she as
well as the rest of her family will be found dead—but not on
the
highway because she has so convincingly persuaded the
children to
demand that Bailey take the fatal detour, and thus she is
responsible for
the accident. Her culpability is crucial in preparing for the
story's
climax, pointing the finger of blame directly at the
grandmother. As
if she has not done enough, she seals her family's doom when
she
shrieks, "You're The Misfit! [...] I recognized you at once!"
The Misfit

replies, "[I]t would have been better for all of you, lady, if you
hadn't
of reckernized me" (CS 127). The further irony, of course, is
that a few
moments before she blurts out the words that seal her fate, she
knew
this man's face was familiar but "she could not recall who he
was" (CS
126).
Moreover, the revision that O'Connor made in the completed
1955
version shows that she wanted the old woman to bear the total
blame
for putting the family in harm's way and meeting the dragon.
"A Good
Man Is Hard to Find" in the Avon volume (1953) differs from
that in A
Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) in one important respect: the
road
detour in the 1953 story is taken because of construction,
whereas that
of the 1955 story is taken because of the manipulative ol d
woman. She
is to blame for luring her family off the highway on a wild-
goose chase,

having told her grandchildren about silver hidden behind a
secret panel
in a plantation house when Sherman's troops rampaged through
Geor
gia. Both detours lead to The Misfit, Hiram, and Bobby Lee,
but the
significance of O'Connor's revision is that now the
grandmother is
even more responsible for their fate. In the introduction to his
casebook on this story, Frederick Asals comments briefly upon
this
essential difference between the two versions and notes the
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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 47
grandmother's culpability for the detour in the revision (4).
However,
Asals offers no further analysis and no mention of the two-page
draft.
To be more specific about how O'Connor rewrote this crucial
detour scene, we look at both stories after the family leaves
Red

Sammy's Tower restaurant. Paragraph forty-five of the 1953
version
begins the same as the 1955 final draft: "They drove off again
into the
hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke herself
up
every few minutes with her own snoring." However, in the next
sentence after the words "Outside of Toombsboro," the 1953
version
reads, "the highway was being paved and they had to detour on
a red
dirt road" (Avon 191), whereas the 1955 version reads, "she
woke up
and recalled an old plantation [. . (CS 123). As the old woman
"craftily" weaves her tale about the hidden family silver, she
entraps
herself and her family in a web of deceit. They are easy prey
for the
dragon waiting "by the side of the road."
Reworking the story for the 1955 publication, O'Connor
explains
this detour from the highway—which is a significant detour in
charac
terization—by adding fifty-two lines of richly realistic details,
with the

grandmother's nagging, John Wesley's yelling and kicking,
June Star's
whining, and even the baby's screaming. The words "They
turned onto
the dirt road and" mark the end of this addition to the 1953
version
(Avon 191). O'Connor seamlessly merges the revised passage
into the
words "the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust." She
then
adds another rewritten passage to create the accident scene.
Both versions have the grandmother recalling earlier times and
describe the landscape; both use the words "then the next
minute, they
would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking
down
on them" (Avon 191; CS 124). But the final version reveals
more
revision in the section preceding the accident. The 1953
version
blames the sharply curving, uneven road for the valise falling
over and
the hidden cat jumping out: "The grandmother's big black
valise was
shaken from its place in the corner. The old lady gasped,

remembering
the cat for the first time. The newspaper top she had over the
basket
rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing sprang onto Bailey's shoulder"
(Avon
191). However, the 1955 version adds, "'This place had better
turn up
in a minute,' Bailey said, 'or I'm going to turn around"' (CS
124). This
��104.198.4.142 on Thu, 25 Nov 2021
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version includes nine more lines here, detailing how the
grandmother
gets a "horrible thought" that makes her feet jump up and upset
the
valise, thus freeing the snarling cat. Once again, the revision
reaffirms
the grandmother's guilt. Both versions have much the same
wording

about the accident, but O'Connor adds, "The horrible thought
[the
grandmother] had had before the accident was that the house
she had
remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee"
(CS 125).
Despite her sudden epiphany, she does not share the knowledge
with
her family, and her "horrible thought" leads to horrible
consequences.
Whereas the grandmother is clearly constructed as an imperfect
woman by this final version, in the early fragmentary draft
O'Connor
might have been considering the mother as the more fallible
one to
have the final confrontation with The Misfit. She certainly
seems a
likely contender as she dresses like a would-be Hollywood
stage
mother and reads Screen Mothers and Their Children. Because
O'Connor had in her library a first edition copy of Nathanael
West's
The Day of the Locust (1939), West's image of Mrs. Loomis, an
overbearing stage mother in Los Angeles, immediately comes
to mind.

Another image is that of her not-so-adorable son Adore,
provocatively
singing the sexually suggestive "Mama Doan Wan' No Peas";
West
describes the would-be child movie star this way:
"His singing voice was deep and rough and he used the broken
groan of the blues singer quite expertly [...]. He seemed to
know
what the words meant, or at least his body and his voice
seemed
to know. When he came to the final chorus, his buttocks
writhed
and his voice carried a top-heavy load of sexual pain." (107-08)
This characterization must have struck O'Connor as perverted
in much
the same way as her writing about an absurd, but perversely
amusing
newspaper item she had read of—a "crimped and beribboned
seven
year-old" singing the popular blues song "A Good Man Is Hard
to Find"
to win an amateur contest (Fitzgerald xi).
The early two-page draft also offers a fascinating insight about
the
only family member to survive the massacre. Granny does not
hide
Pitty Sing (O'Connor stays firmly committed to this name) in

the
fragment draft. The cat awakens from a nap, jumps into the
front of the
car, and causes Boatwrite to swerve into a ditch. Pitty Sing is a
"large
��104.198.4.142 on Thu, 25 Nov 2021
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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 49
grey-striped cat with a yellow hind leg and a big solid white
face"; in
the final draft O'Connor describes the cat as "gray-striped with
a broad
white face and an orange nose—clinging to [Bailey's] neck like
a
caterpillar" (CS 124-25). Also the fragment gives the cat an
aloof,
almost hostile personality: "Granny thought that she was the
only
person in the world that he really loved but the truth was he
had never
looked farther up than her middle and he didn't even like other
cats."
In the revision, she defies Bailey's authority (he does not like

bringing
the cat to a motel) by sneaking Pitty Sing into the
hippopotamus-head
valise because she thinks "he would miss her too much" and
because
"he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally
asphyxiate himself" (CS 118). Thus, O'Connor has again
sharpened
her focus to make the grandmother more culpable.
Still another example of O'Connor's re-visioning of the grand
mother appears right after the accident. In the two-page draft
Pitty
Sing jumps snarling onto Boatwrite, whose shoulders "[snap]
above
his head" as the car nose-dives into a red embankment. The
draft
continues, '"Count the children, count the children!' Granny
screamed
for her first thoughts were always for others." In stark contrast
is the
image in the final version of the self-absorbed, manipulating
old
woman: "The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard,
hoping
she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on
her all
at once" (CS 125). Although it is only her hat that is broken,

she tries
to get attention and sympathy by complaining that she has
injured an
organ. Everyone ignores her.
The 1953 version differs in other interesting ways.
Surprisingly,
the word not is omitted at a most crucial point. As the
grandmother
pleads for her life, the passage erroneously reads, '"Jesus, you
ought to
shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've got!'" (Avon 198).
Did
O'Connor ever read the published story word for word to see
this
glaring editorial mistake? We have no way of knowing.
Another
(presumably intentional) difference at the end of the story
cleverly
humanizes The Misfit after the cold-blooded murders. The 1953
version reads, '"Take her off and throw her where you thrown
the
others,' he said" (Avon 199); however, the 1955 version adds
that he
"[picked] up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg" (CS
133).
��104.198.4.142 on Thu, 25 Nov 2021
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Consequently, the reader considers the possibility, however
remote, of
The Misfit's becoming a good man by the end of his life.
The Avon version of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" appeared a
year after Wise Blood, so it is intriguing to compare how
O'Connor
handles the theme of the human spirit under construction in
both
works, particularly as she shapes her vision of the
grandmother.
Coincidentally, Wise Blood precedes "A Good Man Is Hard to
Find" in
the 1962 collection Three by Flannery O'Connor, so the two
works
invite comparison. Two pages before the end of Wise Blood
Haze
Motes lies "in a drainage ditch near an abandoned construction
project"
{Three 125). Indeed, both Motes—"honest-to-Jesus blind man"
(Three
117)—and the Christ-haunted Misfit are abandoned projects
under
construction. Motes, having seen beyond his own limited
existence,

chooses not to see anymore, whereas The Misfit takes off his
glasses
and cleans them to see more clearly, leaving his eyes "red-
rimmed and
pale and defenseless-looking" (CS 132-33). Furthermore,
before his
conversion, Motes declares, "Nobody with a good car needs to
be
justified" (Three 64), and The Misfit needs a good car to
continue the
escape. Indeed, The Misfit suffers the existential dilemma of
whether
he can believe without seeing Christ's miracles, but he seems to
be
moving toward the need for God's grace. Motes clears the
motes from
his eyes and dies at home with the old landlady, and the
grandmother
sees clearly when she touches The Misfit just before she dies
smiling.
O'Connor's brilliant "re-visioning" of the manipulative grand
mother makes the old woman more responsible for the family's
trag
edy, yet The Misfit brings her to a state of grace. The reader
gains more

insight into O'Connor's writing process by tracing the
grandmother's
evolution—from being a vain, manipulating hypocrite to being
a good
woman—and following the story's evolution from the fragment
to the
1953,1955, and 1962 versions. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
proves
that, like human beings, stories are merely works under
construction.
��104.198.4.142 on Thu, 25 Nov 2021
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Volume 26-27 • 1998-2000 51
Works Cited
* Permission to quote from the two unpublished pages of "A
Good Man Is Hard to
Find" is granted by O'Connor's literary executor, Robert
Giroux, and Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux. The quotations are ©2000 by the Estate of
Flannery O'Connor.
Asals, Frederick, ed. Introduction. "A Good Man Is Hard to
Find. "
Women Writers: Text and Contexts Series. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers UP, 1993.
Driggers, Stephen G., and Robert J. Dunn, with Sarah Gordon.
Introduc
tion. The Manuscripts of Flannery O'Connor at Georgia
College.
Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.
Fitzgerald, Sally, ed. Introduction. The Habit of Being. Letters
of
Flannery O 'Connor. New York: Farrar, 1979.
Martin, Renae. "Sin and Punishment According to Flannery
O'Connor."
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find. " Ed. Laura Zaidman. Harcourt
Brace
Casebook Series in Literature. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1999.
O'Connor, Flannery. Undated fragment of "A Good Man Is
Hard to Find."
The Flannery O'Connor Collection. Georgia College & State
Univer
sity.
—. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Avon Book of Modern
Writing.
Ed. William Phillips and Philip Rahv. New York: Avon, 1953.
186
99.
—. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories. New
York:
Farrar, 1971. 117-33.

—. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Three by Flannery
O'Connor. New
York: New American Library, 1962. 128-43.
—. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. New
York: Farrar,
1979.
West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust.
New York:
New Directions, 1962.
��104.198.4.142 on Thu, 25 Nov 2021
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Contentsp. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51Issue
Table of ContentsFlannery O'Connor Bulletin, Vol. 26/27
(1998-2000) pp. 1-202Front MatterFrom the Editor"Like a
Boulder Blocking Your Path": Scandal and Skandalon in
Flannery O'Connor [pp. 1-23]In Memoriam Sarah Morgan
(Sally) Fitzgerald 1917-2000 [pp. 24-24]Flannery O'Connor's
Written Conversations: Correspondence in the Flannery
O'Connor Collection at Georgia College & State University [pp.
25-42]The Evolution of a Good Woman [pp. 43-51]A Thomist's
Letters to "A" [pp. 52-72]Lupus and Corticosteroid Imagery in
the Works of Flannery O'Connor [pp. 74-93]Reflections on the
Pilgrimage [pp. 94-96]The Compassionate Tears of Mrs. Kempe
and Mrs. Greenleaf: Heaven's Daughters, Earth Mothers [pp. 97-
123]Memory, Perception, and Imagination in Flannery
O'Connor's "Wildcat" [pp. 124-134]A Note on "A Late
Encounter with the Enemy" [pp. 136-138]A Retreat Home:
Flannery O'Connor's Disempowered Daughters [pp. 139-153]A
Good Man Is Easy to Find (a fiction) [pp. 155-168]Stopped by a
Naked Woman: O'Connor's Departure from the "Kenyon

Review" [pp. 169-181]Review: untitled [pp. 182-185]Review:
untitled [pp. 186-189]Review: untitled [pp. 190-192]Review:
untitled [pp. 193-195]Review: untitled [pp. 196-199]Notes on
Contributors [pp. 200-202]
342 Mohamad Hani, Analysis of
Social...
Available online at: http://jurnal.um-
palembang.ac.id/englishcommunity/index
ISSN 2549–9009 (print), ISSN 2579–7387 (online)
ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL PROBLEM IN A GOOD MAN IS
HARD TO FIND BY
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Mohamad Hani
English Education Study Program
University of Muhammadiyah Bengkulu
[email protected]
Abstract
This study aims to describe the problems of social problems
contained in the short story "A Good Man Is
Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. This research appli ed
descriptive qualitative. The data source is the

short story which title is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by
Flannery O'Connor. The results of this study
are: (1) Family disorganization, due to lack of communication
and lack of social relations within the
Bailey family, (2) Crime, the Misfit who came out of the
prisoner all members of the Bailey family, (3)
Social status, the grandmother who is selfish and does
everything she can to maintain social status and
people's views on her. On the basis of the results, it has been
concluded and by using the sociological
aspect that the social problem events in the story can be a
lesson and improve understanding and
interpretation in communicating and socializing in life. This
study is hopefully more useful for readers of
literary books, especially the work of Flannery O'Connor and
writers.
Keywords: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor,
social problem, crime, social status,
disorganization family.
©Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris FKIP UM Palembang
Introduction

This paper will identify the variety
of social problems that appears in this
short story by using the sociological and
psychological approaches. This is
because the story of the grandmother's
family life and the villain's misfit. The
story is full of irregularities or things that
should not be done in community life.
However, before going any further, it
would better to understand the definition
and some of the elements used in a short
story. The short story is fictional prose
with a fairly short story because it only
tells one main conflict faced by the
characters in the story. The short story
also has several elements. The following
are elements that are used in a short
story such as theme, characterization,

plot, setting, conflict, and point of view.
A literary work in the form of short
stories in which there is a conflict of
stories that imply social problems that
occur. It makes the writer interested in
conducting this study.
Mural Esten (1978: 9) gives the
opinion that literature can be used as a
source of artistic and imaginative
expression as a form of manifestation of
human life (and social) through language
as a medium that has a positive impact
on human life. Then in a short story,
there must be a social aspect that is
usually expressed in stories in the form
of conflicts that occur between each
character story.
If we try to understand further,

Wellek and Warren (Semi 1989:178)
said that sociology and literature are two
elements that are interconnected with
each other. Namely the existence of a
mandate or social message that is
captured in the literary works of the
author who wants to be conveyed.
Furthermore, Lucien Goldmann
(1967:494) explained that in identifying
social problems in a story not only can
be expressed from the behavior of the
characters in the story. It may also be
taken from the point of view of other
subjects in the story (the behavior of
animals or views of other objects) that
can be used as material in solving
problems that is.
http://jurnal.um-palembang.ac.id/englishcommunity/index

English Community Journal (2019), 3 (1): 342–349 343
Besides using a sociological
approach, the writer will also use other
elements contained in a short story,
namely psychological approaches.
According to Wellek and Warren
(1989:41), psychology and literature
have a connection between each other
because an author must turn on each
character in the story through the action
or personality (psychology) of each
character that is the characteristic of
each character in the story. Therefore the
personality or psychology of each

character can be used as a reference in
researching a literary work such as a
short story.
The purpose of study is to
identify social problems in the short
story entitled A Good Man Is Hard to
Find by Flannery O’Connor. This story
tells a family that has problems in it.
There are two characters that have a big
role in this story, namely the
grandmother as a "good person" and the
villain misfit. Here the grandmother who
is the meaning of "good person" is not
the real meaning, but a person who has a
bad person who tries to look like a
perfect person. “The grandmother stood
up and waved both arms dramatically to
attract their attention” (page 7). This

indicates that the grandmother was
behaving that she was seriously injured
to cover up her mistake that she had
forgotten and did not mention that the
house was in Tennessee, this is the initial
trigger of the main conflict in this story.
The Misfit: "Jesus has shown everything
off balance” (page 11). The villain's
misfit in the story is described as an evil
and sadistic act in action but in terms of
personality (psychological) he also
questions the religious problem where
usually other criminals don't think about
it.
The quote above is the proof or
data that can be a reference in this
analysis that has included the social and
psychological aspects in it. This study is

expected to be able to increase the
knowledge of the readers in order to be
able to identify the social and
psychological issues contained in this
short story.
Literature Review
The definition of sociology
according to max weber, namely
sociology is a science which attempts the
interpretive understanding of social
action in order, it is a causal explanation
of its course and effects (Weber, 1964:
88). Based on the opinion of Weber,
sociology is knowledge in interpreting
an action in the social sphere that has an
impact in the future. Referring to a
literary work, sociology can be a
reference from the reader in tracing

social elements in literature, such as
deviations from norms in life.
Through a literary work such
as a short story, the author can tell a
polemic or conflict about life in society.
A short story work presents the problem
of life issues which basically contains an
intention behind it, which is expected to
the reader to be able to take the value of
social values in it. Hence, the sociology
aspect can be one of the main factors of
a literary work, including in the short
story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". So,
literary works in the form of short stories
are basically fictional, but social facts
can be a dominating element in literary
making (Fananie, 2002:133).
Based on some experts' views

on sociological aspects in literature, in
this study using the views of Wellek and
Warren (semi, 1989: 53) states that
sociology is divided into three
classifications, including: (1) author's
sociology, (2) sociology in literary
works, and (3) literary sociology.
Therefore, this paper focuses more on
the second classification, namely
sociology in literary works.
An action which ultimately
becomes the trigger of every social
http://jurnal.um-palembang.ac.id/englishcommunity/index
344 Mohamad Hani, Analysis of
Social...

problem in life certainly has a starting
point for that cause to arise. Namely the
psychological aspect. According to Shaw
and Ostanzo (1970: 3), that psychology
is science that studies behavior patterns
of individuals as a function of social
stimuli. The forms of psychological
interpretation vary, such as anger,
selfishness, a sense of help, and
socialization. In examining the study of
social problems in a short story we need
to find the starting point for the problem
to come.
So that the two elements in this
literary work (sociology and
psychology) become interconnected with
each other. Hauser (1985:119), said that
aspects of the psychological aspect can

be useful in sociology in a literary work
if it has a relationship with morality as a
whole. In other words, psychological
aspects are useful in the analysis of
social aspects in literature.
As can be seen from this study
a social problem can be examined by
considering the sociological aspects and
psychological aspects are very important
in characterization because it is
complicated to explain how participants,
in relation to others, manipulate
language and actions to pursue their
specific goals. The relationship between
sociology and literature has been the
motivation of researchers to conduct
similar studies to explore how the impact
of social problems in the environment in

general and specifically can help in the
interpretation of literature.
Methodology
This study discusses about the
social problems in the conversations of
the story A good man is hard to find. In
this study, the author used qualitative
methods by collecting evidence of data
in the form of utterances, excerpts of
text, clarifying data, then analyzing the
data chronologically based on the pages
where they were made, then made
conclusion.
It was used to analyze social
messages and problems in short stories,
especially works that consist mostly of
conversations and sentences like good

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