...Compare and Contrast The theme I chose to centralize my paper on is race and/or ethnicity. I will compare and contrast two poems: “Child of The Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales and “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t) by Patricia Smith. Morales is a woman if mixed race; Puerto Rican and Jewish, while Smith is African-American. We all want to think that someone’s race or color of their skin wouldn’t determine how they are treated or how they are perceived, but this is not the case. When talking amongst friends about someone they do not know we often describe them by using their skin color. And when meeting someone new one of the first questions we ask is “what race are you?” or the harsher “what are you?” Both of these poems give the reader a look into the mind of two young women of different races, one being mixed and the other being an African American, and how each girl views herself. The poem, “Child of The Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales, the reader looks into the consciousness of a young multi-racial woman. Morales herself is a multiracial woman “Puerto Rican-born and Jewish American Aurora Levins Morales is a poet, essayist, historian, and activist” (Fiandt, 2006). Morales’ poem talks about finding ones identity. Morales starts her poem off by stating that she is an American “she does not claim any single identity beyond “American” and this “American” includes the multiple races and nationalities that have entered the Western hemisphere”...
Words: 1986 - Pages: 8
...The Bluest Eye such capable is the use of special techniques that safe the readers attention at all times. Though Morrison structered her novel with an exposition, climax and conclusion, the plot is still very complicated and never a simple one. You can compare the way Morrison changes charecter perspectives and time frames to building a tower, giving the audience only pieces of knowledge little by little. Furthermore, it sometimes even feels like the novel started at the climax and goes intentionally back to the exposition, because you get to know the tragedy in the beginning but you have to experience the end first by reading the book. The change between the characters narrative enhances the way Morrison structered her story. Another very important stylistic aspect is the change in the character narratives which changes from 3rd person omniscent to a lot of first persons of Cholly, Paulina, Pecola and Claudia. While it could be perceived as bemusing, it is definitely an exciting way of experiencing the story. It also provides the opportunity to cover broad steps of time and space with the third-person omniscent narration. For example the way Marrison let the reader know about Soaphead Church’s white ancestors. In addition to that, Morrison uses...
Words: 970 - Pages: 4
...time. Either they stay or they must leave fading into the stones of time. Waiting for the day they could be surface and remembered. That is the case for everywhere even the Americas. Where ceramics and constructions have been the focal point since 1300 A.D. you can find such beauty and art. Even their fabrics have something to say. In Mesoamerica, they carved four basalt heads from huge stones. They used stone tools to do this and even were able to transport the carvings that weigh about 10 tons across 60 miles of swampland. They carved ceramic figurines out of jade a very prized stone in Mesoamerica. The tribes in Mesoamerica sometimes would carve axe shaped objects out of the very same jade. In West Mexico, they were best known for their traditions with sculpting clay. The ceramic figures found in Colima are red and orange in contrast to west...
Words: 553 - Pages: 3
...Elias Van Sickle Narratives of Identity Professor Valcik 23 October 2014 Internalized Inferiority An individual’s conception of societal norms and beliefs is developed over time through the observation of and interaction with others. In modern times, one might come to understand feminine beauty as thin rather than voluptuous through exposure to the magazines, television and other media outlets that display images of “beautiful” thin models. Simply because a belief is widespread does not make it true or moral; the exclusive portrayal of the thin woman as beautiful is an extremely narrow definition of beauty that is far from true and may be very damaging: it can negatively impact women’s self worth and leads many to attempt to change their identities to conform to society’s perverted projection of a beautiful woman’s appearance. Similarly, in the past, the widespread internalization of the false and immoral belief of white superiority and black inferiority had numerous destructive effects on blacks. Toi Derricotte, a light skinned black women who recounts her experience with racism in the memoir The Black Notebooks, and Malcom X whose life story and transformation into a racial leader are told in The Autobiography of Malcom X, both recognize the deleterious effects of internalized racism on themselves and other blacks; however, the nature of their efforts to address its harms differ, reflecting their respective visions for societal betterment. In order to fully understand...
Words: 1516 - Pages: 7
...SOCIALIZATION AND THE TAHITIAN CULTURE Rodolfo C. Pimentel Columbia Southern University SOC 1010 Socialization and the Tahitian Culture Introduction to the Tahitian Culture The culture that I chose to research was Tahiti. I have always wanted to visit the islands of Tahiti to experience the beautiful landscape, rich culture and friendly locals. Currently, Tahiti is a nation in the Pacific which is blended in the French and Polynesian heritage. The language spoken in Tahiti is mainly Tahitian and Tuamotu while English and French are learned as secondary languages. The number...
Words: 734 - Pages: 3
...Crossing with the Virgin Can you imagine being confined in a world that has you taken for granted and full of mental abuse? Crossing the Mexican border is a journey and new beginning for many undocumented workers. In their eyes it’s a path for many privileges and opportunities. They feel as if all the hardship and struggles they face will just fade away. The narratives of Crossing with the Virgin portray conflicts that occur for undocumented workers crossing the Mexican border. For many illegal immigrants I personally feel that finding a stable job will be difficult, they will be taken advantage of, and eventually they will either be incarcerated or be deported back to their country. Dago is a man that lives in the city of Mexico with his wife and two daughters. Both he and his wife Elena own two beautiful houses. Dago works at a Levi Strauss’s Mexico division as an executive while his wife is a manager of a computer equipment company. Dago and his wife enjoyed the life they were living and were satisfied with everything that has happened in their lives. But, one day Dago was informed by his boss that the company he was working for was closing. Life for Dago went completely downhill from this point on. Dago was forced to move to his other house and eventually had to sell that house due to financial problems. His wife wanted a divorce and Dago had no choice but to cross the border. Dago arrived in Nebraska and expected an enhanced lifestyle but, things just got worse for Dago...
Words: 937 - Pages: 4
...Introduction How exciting it is to open the bible to the book of Exodus and read the narrative of the fulfillment of God’s promise in the rescue of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt—the call of Moses, the plagues, and the dramatic manifestation of God on Mt. Sinai. Though the book of Exodus is most famous for the revelation of the Ten Commandments contained in Chapter 20, it remains vague in terms of where the biblical account actually occurred, and yet we cannot begin to fully understand the Old Testament if we look at it as merely a piece of great literature, or as some have suggested nothing more than interesting legend, or the elaboration of superior ideals. … The Book of Exodus is a narrative of the sacred history of Israel from the sojourn in Egypt to the completion of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. The term Exodus comes from the Greek terminology and literally means “going out,” an appropriate title for the book that narrates how under the leadership of Moses, the Israelites escaped from Egyptian persecution and began their journey back to the Promised Land. To be certain, all human history is the scope of God’s sovereignty. God became especially involved in the lives of a relatively unknown people, culminating a historical event that changed biblical history and altered the course of their lives and culture. When we seek to understand the meaning of our individual life events, we don’t actually begin with birth or infancy, even though a biographical account...
Words: 2839 - Pages: 12
...magnificently in this case only because Mohsin Hamid is a superb writer with formidable powers. He grips the reader's mind with polished and haunting prose. The hero of the novel, Changez, a student from Lahore, Pakistan, attends Princeton University. After graduation at the top in his class, he secures an excellent and well-paying job at the elite valuation firm Underwood Samson. He becomes well-adjusted and well-accustomed to the American way of life, falls in love with the beautiful and elegant, Princeton-educated Erica, who hails from an aristocratic family. For the first time in his life Changez is happy. Then, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2001, two planes crash into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. As a result, the towers collapse. And along with the towers, Changez's personal world also collapses. When the terrorists are identified as Muslims from Saudi Arabia, and people, and the media speculate about the reasons for the attack, Changez finds himself questioning the injustices by America abroad. His priorities...
Words: 1517 - Pages: 7
...addictive drug that caused millions of deaths in America only. The narrator and his brother Sonny’s childhood were filled with rage and darkness.(Lovalerie,Scott,2000). The narrator assimilated into the white society deeply but is still saddened by the racism and placed restrictions to be found upon his opportunity. Sonny, the main character channels his suffering into music, Jazz music that is, which was and still is very popular especially in the African American community. The story also has biblical implications, which relate to the Holy Bible, Baldwin’s style of writing is a poetic style, not meaning that the story rhymes, but poetic in a way that the writing is very lyrical and beautiful, such as this passage “As the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last.” The paragraph seems to be very musical as the way he puts his sentences together, the way he describes his neighborhood is really lovely. The fact that his writing seems musical is very suitable for his story specifically because it features music, and its one of the central themes. His writing certainly has a musical beat to it and he shows how technique and plot can come together and create a narrative. To add, At one point Sonny speaks in a letter...
Words: 788 - Pages: 4
...[pic] In The Voyage Out, one of Woolf's wittiest, socially satirical novels, Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship, and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. As a ship makes its way to an exotic location in South America, a young woman begins her own journey inward in Virginia Woolf’s 1915 novel The Voyage Out. Rachel Vinrace is traveling far away from her home in London. Her fellow passengers are a fascinating and motley assortment of members of Edwardian society whose lives and relationships reveal much about the world from which they come. Through witty comedy and stark tragedy, Woolf examines such themes as family, culture, and the individual in this remarkable portrait of modern life. Its unique and lyrical style, which has garnered the novel praise since its first publication, adds an artistic dimension to this surprisingly current novel. Indeed,The Voyage Out is a beautiful and telling work about self and society that rings as true today as in 1915. 1919, Night and Day [pic] [pic] Originally published in 1919, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives of four major characters while examining the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success. Like Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, Night and Day is a more traditional narrative than her later novels. Unlike her first novel, however, Night and Day relies much more on its characters' internal...
Words: 1559 - Pages: 7
...mohsinhamid.com home about novels essays stories interviews connect The Reluctant Fundamentalist Published in 2007 in these languages. Became an international bestseller with over a million copies in print. Was adapted for the cinema. Awards Won the Ambassador Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Asian American Literary Award, Premio Speciale Dal Testo Allo Schermo, and South Bank Show Award for Literature. Was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Arts Council England Decibel Award, Australia-Asia Literary Award, and Index on Censorship T R Fyvel Award. Was named a Book of the Decade by the Guardian and a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Reviews 'An artist of fantastic cunning... demonstrates what certain trumped-up laureates of post-modernity seem incapable of grasping: that it is possible to simultaneously address the byzantine monstrosity of contemporary existence and care about the destiny of one's characters... [a] resounding success... not unworthy of Nabokov.' -- The Village Voice (full review) 'Taut and accomplished... Changez's story, which seems to gush from him like blood from a wound, traces the self's shifting sense of itself against the rumblings of a rudely shaken world... Dostoyevskian.' -- San Francisco Chronicle (full review) 'Changez's voice is extraordinary. Cultivated, restrained, yet also barbed and...
Words: 1238 - Pages: 5
...In the contemporary century where the world is metamorphosed to a global village, the concept of national culture and national literature is certainly belied. The World literature, today, simultaneously represents an important multicultural perspective within individual national literatures as well as more global perspective taking in the phenomena of transculturalism and diaspora confluence. Centripetal and centrifugal forces can be discerned as both antagonistic and complementary forces in cultural development. Raymond Williams develops a theory of relation between culture at large and cultural products like literature. Culture is manifested in human artifacts and activities such as music, literature, life-style, food, painting, sculpture, theatre and film. It can be said that arts and the world of science with their moral systems come to form culture. These are constantly in a spatio-temporal flux that renders an inexhaustible range of meanings and a catalogue of the elements. In this process of evolution a particular aspect dominates or fades off at some space-time coordinate. The pattern of human activity and the symbolic structures give such activities significance and importance. Rushdie, like other postcolonial writers not only reflects upon the political aspects of history but also deconstructs the interrelationships between history and individual to delve into the moral and psychological tensions of the native homeland. His novels are the fine example where ethics of...
Words: 6746 - Pages: 27
...The Narrative Art of The Great Gatsby Introduction The Great Gatsby was written in 1925. The author, Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is one of the most outstanding writers in America. As a member of the “lost generation”, Fitzgerald made the short life of Gatsby epitome of the rise, boom and decline of the “American Dream” in “Jazz Age”. This novel shows us unusually rich literary and aesthetic connotation is has by its unique narrative perspective, the ups and downs of plot, superb accurate language, various rhetorical devices and vivid character images. To some extent, the reason why The Great Gatsby can become a famous classic work is that the author uses extraordinary narrative techniques in it. All the techniques are employed skillfully by Fitzgerald. The study of narrative art in this work has been highlighted in the research area in these years. Zhang Jinfeng(2001) analyzes the role of Nick in the novel from the its structure, themes and other aspects. Cheng Xilin(2009) uses the spatial narrative theory to discussed the space narrative art in The Great Gatsby from three aspects: the geography space, social space and the text space. Xiao Dongbo(2009) starts with the analysis on author and characters and expound the connotation of "American dream" and profoundly reveals the historical process of the formation, development and burst of the "American dream". Shang Guanghui(2011) analyzes The Great Gatsby from the narrators of the role and argues that the communication...
Words: 5017 - Pages: 21
...stories narrated by Yunior tells his stories from different points of view of life. The events and experiences mentioned in this novel by Diaz are what most Hispanic teenagers go through. As the novel begins with “The fact that I am writing you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you.” (Drown). This epigraph in beginning by Gustavo Perez Firmat gives a clue of focusing Hispanic community. After reading the whole book my question is this book merely story telling or autobiographical? This question came to my mind by relating Diaz’s interview in Colbert’s show. Stephen Colbert, the host of show when asked him how he came to America, Diaz answered that his father first came to New York, settled here and called them over. Diaz also mentioned that he saw his dad the first time as he was away from family and once they landed to America his father took them to New Jersey which was weird according to Diaz. Same scenario was somewhat presented in beginning of Drown but through Yunior- the narrator. Diaz used the specific words and some symbols which the reader can almost feel the story as if it is real. Diaz, who was born in Santo Domingo in Dominican Republic and migrated to New Jersey when he was six; portrayed the barrios of Dominican Republican and struggling urban communities of New Jersey. Overall, he presented many themes in Drown jumping from one important chapter of life to another. For instance, poverty, cultural difference, hope of living American dream, family...
Words: 2142 - Pages: 9
...Lex Cornia LI 532 Final Paper March 15, 2008 East of Eden: The Discovery of Innocence on the Western Frontier The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of such unspeakable softness that it was a pain to come within the doors of civilization… How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature The West captivates people. The West both as a direction of navigation and as an idea occupies a magical realm where boundaries become blurred and what is light becomes twilight and dark. Just as the East represents the arrival of sun with its light and rationality—of darkness dispelled— so too does the West embody the loss of that sun’s light and logic and the commencement of night. However, there are more boundaries between East and West than merely the presence or absence of light. After the time of Columbus, the people who looked toward the West, and particularly the North American continent, saw more than just land. The West was a sacred place where magic, hallowed, and even treacherous experiences were possible. This idea that possibilities existed in the West that did not exist elsewhere motivated millions to leave the Old World for the new and redefine themselves in a Western landscape of unlimited possibilities. What is the West? These early settlers, religionists, and explorers to the West came to the shores of the Atlantic seaboard unsure of what to expect from the new...
Words: 4300 - Pages: 18
