...outcast. Gender roles seem to be the most common. From the day a child is born societal norms are placed on them. For example a young boy’s room will be probably be blue and filled with sports items, while a young girls room will be pink and be filled with dolls and a play kitchen set. These small details, along with expectations, begin to shape their role in society. “Barbie Q” by Sandra Cisneros is a perfect example of societal expectations. In this short story Cisneros introduces two young girls who are playing with their Barbie dolls. The girls go into great detail when describing their dolls and the outfits the dolls are wearing. One can conclude that the girls are poor when the main character tells the reader that they only have one outfit for their dolls. They even had to make a dress from a sock because they could not afford other outfits. This is further illustrated when the girls begin describing how they will play with the dolls. Everyday the two girls play out the same story with the two Barbies fighting over an invisible Ken doll. One day when walking through a market, the young girls discover a set of dolls that have been damaged by a fire in the toy warehouse. Although the dolls are not clean and still smell of smoke, the girls do not mind. As long as they can dress their Barbies with the outfits and continue to play...
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...see how war devastates the mind, how it leaves people longing for peace and salvation, even if they can’t remember what it is they have done or seen. To begin, Owen uses the structure of Futility to convey a single event and the subsequent thoughts it evokes. He uses the simple sonnet form to find the essence of what a death brings to him – the feeling of utter pointlessness. Even though it is much more brief than Come on, Come back, he emphasises the feelings of emptiness that death can bring. He uses half-rhyme to create a disjointed, unnatural feel that makes the poem feel strange and creates a strange disjointed harmony. It doesn’t quite sound right. This is superbly appropriate for the subject itself. Even though the dead soldier looks as if he is just sleeping, he isn’t. It isn’t quite right. He also builds on the series of questions he asks in the poem to build up to the most profound of all: “Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?” Here we see how he cannot understand why the universe bothered to raise anything, to build a civilisation, when it is all for nothing. We destroy each other. Although Come on, Come back is a narrative poem, it still uses the structure to build up to a climax, just as Owen did. The line lengths and the way the lines fall, as well as the odd rhymes of ‘stone’ in the first stanza are also disjointed and fragmented. Thus we see how the poet uses rhythm and rhyme to create a sense of a fragmented, confused, disharmonious...
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...to discuss the death of Aiyana and the rape of Officer Blumer. The situations in both the articles are real occurrence, but the storyline appears as an imaginary plot. Ultimately, the two essays convey the information in a way that makes it appear as fiction. The paper seeks to identify the creative use of techniques usually associated with fiction that are involved in the story development of these two articles. Some of these techniques include the use of subjective, personal voice, the development of strong characters and the creation of tension and suspense. In both the two articles, the authors use subjective journalism where they involve their views into conveying the reality in a way that they want to manipulate the readers. In an article by Sabrina Rubin, the author describes how Rebecca Blumer was raped by three army men. The military officers did not treat this case kindly as they discouraged her from asking for a rape kit and failed to collect forensic evidence. Finally, her skyrocketing military job came to an end. Although it may be a factual narrative, the author reports only one side of the story; about the military’s culture of rape. Consequently, Rebecca allegations could have been a hoax. On the other hand, Charlie, the author of “What Killed Jones?” is also subjective especially where he blames abject poverty on the death of a young girl. He describes the life of Detroit and uses statistics to persuade the reader to agree that that “one death” was a reflection...
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...Although Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of a Slave were written for the same purpose they differ in a few ways. For example, Incidents is a very family oriented narrative while The Narrative is based on personal perseverance. At the beginning of The Narrative, Douglass gives the reader a sense of the role family played in his life when he writes about his mother’s death as, “I received the tidings of her death with the same emotions I felt at the death of a stranger” (4). On the other hand, family plays a huge part in Incidents and this can be seen throughout the entire narrative. Towards the end of Incidents Jacobs writes what Linda’s grandmother thinks of her escaping as, “whenever you do go, it will break...
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...learning about American Literature. There were some awesome topics, essays and readings that were my favorites. However, there were also some few topics that even though were interesting to read were my least favorite. The body of this essay is going to be talking about my three favorite as well as my three least topic, essays, forums and reading throughout the course. My first is Anti-Slavery and Slave Narratives in week seven forum, some of the challenges Linda Brent faced while she lived under Flint. While reading, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” it actually made me feel very sad for this...
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...and differences in using the 1st person narrative approach in ‘The Lammas Hireling’ and ‘The Deliverer’. In your answer you should consider the following: • The poets’ development of themes • The poets’ use of language and imagery • The use of other poetic techniques. Both Duhig and Doshi explore the use of a first person narrative in ‘The Lammas Hireling’, and ‘The Deliverer’. This exploration of the narrative technique has allowed both poets to develop ongoing personal themes, each accompanying a sense of sadness and moral injustice. In ‘The Deliverer’, the poet takes advantage of the first person point of view, as it serves to develop ongoing themes of infanticide in Indian Society. This technique of first person is ultimately very largely effective, as its direct approach generally heightens the emotion the reader experiences for the sensitive topic, as there is in fact no hiding or concealing the bitter truth, especially when it is written out in the direct form of a narrative passage. However, the way in which Doshi presents these views through the first person Narrative, is quite unconventional. Through the use of making the ‘Deliverer’s’ daughter the voice, the audience is able to view the tragic events from the eyes of someone who has personally been a witness. This in itself draws similarities with the way in which Duhig presents his narrator’s own personal story of life on a rural farm. He uses the first person narrative to tell the ambiguous story of how as a...
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...Boys and Girls Recent history boldly notes the protests and political unrest surrounding the Vietnam Conflict during the 1960s and 70s. However, equally important in this era are the women who pushed for gender role and publicly rebelled against the established social norm of a woman's "place." Although Alice Munro may not have been burning her bra on the courthouse steps, threads of a feminist influence can be found in "Boys and Girls." Munro's main character, a girl probably modeled after Munro's own childhood experiences on an Ontario farm, faces her awakening body and the challenge of developing her social identity in a man's world. "The girl," an unnamed character, acts as a universal symbol for the initiation of a girl into womanhood. Through first-person narrative, Munro shoes the girl's views of her budding femininity and social identity by describing the girl's conceptions of her parents' work, her parallel to the wild mare Flora, and the "mysterious alterations" (Munro 474) in her personal nightly stories. As if to forsake her femininity and forego a life of confinement and housework, the girl reveres her father's work and condemns her mother's duties. The sum of the girl's respect seems to lie with her father, as is evident in her reference to his work outdoors as "ritualistically important" (468). On the other hand, while the girl recognizes that her mother is busy, she still considers her mother's "work in the house [to be] [·] endless, dreary and peculiarly...
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...paints a mental masterpiece, filled with life stories, musical applications and paired with contextual reporting and analysis. For me, radio grasps my mind from the familiar confines of the world around me and places me in a world far beyond anything that I have actually experienced. Accounts of how a French scuba diver nearly drowned to death in a pursuit to save the life of another diver followed by the scary reality of death among the lives of senior citizens in hospice care are only some of the many intriguing stories that inspire me write for radio broadcasting. “How A Woman’s Plan to Kill Herself Helped Her Family Grieve” written by Alex Spiegel is another story that specifically captures the listener within the confines of its broadcast. Sandy Bem had Alzheimer’s disease—a disease that corrupts the mind’s capacity to remember important family members, read, and write. This disease left Sandy feeling helpless and depressed, later causing her to “commit” suicide—assisted suicide. As Sandy’s health began to deteriorate her feelings of helplessness grew to the point of despair. After wallowing in sadness for countless months, Sandy felt death was the only way to relieve her suffering. Sandy planned a closure ceremony where family and friends were invited to celebrate and relinquish countless memories with and of her that she now couldn’t remember. After hearing Sandy’s decision her daughter, Emily, didn’t like or understand her choice but later came to the realization that this...
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...author Robin Black is focusing on the topic death in a number of different aspects. The first person narrative style is used by the author to structure the story with flashbacks of Sarah’s childhood and present. This structure makes the story very intense and because it is memories, it also makes it very personal, therefore we have a high authenticity within her. Even though we have a very personal and emotional subject as death is, the language used by the author is very neutral and objective, as if the death is of no personal meaning to the narrator, where you would expect a more emotionally charged narrator, if Terry was close to her. Even though we don’t see the emotions from the narrator, we still see emotions in the actions she does, for instance she chooses to wait to have her second child so the age difference would not be the same as her and Terry’s, she hints to that being a reason of too why Terry died, the age gap between them. This indicates that she is becoming superstitious, thus being irrational in her actions. The story is written in present tense, but with a lot of flashbacks from Sarah’s childhood, these flashbacks are written in the past tense. The first flashback we begin with is the one where three of their friends; Johnny Sanderson, Jeff Mandelbaum and Molly Denham, Her brother and she were playing a role play about King Henry VIII and his wives, In this particular flashback we also hear about Terry’s death. We also in this story hear about Sarah’s, son’s...
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...left. As author Thomas Foster says in his book How To Read Literature Like A Professor, "Violence is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications." I see this as saying even though a killing may just seem like a simple killing, it can mean so much more in literature. I beleive that symbolization in this story is, what people will do to survive, including putting all morals behind. Foster also describes how violence is not only a physical act but how it can be a "narrative violence". He describes how narrative violence is the violence an author uses to help him further the plot. He says it is the violence of the author and not the characters. For example when Rue dies, this is used to further show not only the emotion and love Katnis shows, but to also show the violence and aggresion that the other chracters show. But when the boy from district ten dies, no one knows how. All this does is move the story along. No matter the type of violence, it is all not just a killing or a beating, it meens something. When a chracter is killed in this movie it doesnt feel like a huge deal emotionally. As a viewer you know that this will include violence and you expect to see people dying. So when a chracter dies, I personally beleive the plot change isnt momentous. But do some deaths meen...
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...Catalysts act on obstacles an individual faces which assists in overcoming personal and social boundaries. This is significant as it induces growth and transitions which bring new insights and understandings about themselves, others and the world around them. The bildungsroman novel “The story of Tom Brennan” written by J.C Burke and the speech ‘From Death Row To Law Graduate’ by Peter Ouko both follow the transitions of young men who face personal and social boundaries, challenging beliefs and attitudes of both protagonists and the situations they are in resulting in growth and new perceptions. An individual’s personal and social boundaries have an impact on the perceptions of themselves, others and the world around them. The ‘Story Of Tom Brennan’...
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...the poem’s structure. “First Death in Nova Scotia” is a five-stanza poem wherein each stanza contains 10 lines. The stanzas appear short and compact, where the number ten could be associated with any number of things. Age ten is often the age that begins to blur the line between freewheeling childhood imagination and adult reality, where death begins to stew in the young mind as a formal concept. Moreover, age ten sets the tone and age for the narrator and Arthur. If these lines were any longer, it would be uncharacteristic of the individuals that are featured. Ten also represents a simple base value for the surrounding world. Children first learn to count on their fingers...
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...deep that they are hardly comprehensible and give vast meanings that can be interpreted independently through the eyes of the observers. However, one can easily say that the movie is based on the psychological and philosophical norms, in fact, most of the characters are even directly referring to the different psychological theories like nihilism, free will, dream consciousness etc. In this paper, the different theories in the movie, Waking Life, are discussed as represented through the narrative, story, characterization, and cinematography of the film. Discussion The three most exquisite elements of the film are its cinematography, the stellar soundtrack and the philosophical scenes which add to the viewers’ interest in the movie. The director, Richard Linklater, has filmed this movie with the use of the Rotoscopy technique so as to depict that the scenes are happening in the dream of the protagonist (Dobson; Iftody, 2009). There is substantial imagery in the film which supports the narrative. For instance, when one of the characters speaks about reality and free will, water rises up his body as he compares human experience with water or quantum particles float in the air around him when he...
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...Middlesex on its own was just a very all around out of the ordinary story of a person raised as a girl with male biological traits, not to mention all of the events that take place in their life. Cal’s life was anything but normal beginning with the past of his ancestors. His grandparents were brother and sister, his parents were cousins, and his brother was only known as “Chapter Eleven”. Of course Cal’s growing up experience was also definitely out of the ordinary during the understanding of his intersex gender, especially when he is sent to his specialist in New York, who put Cal in very unusual and uncomfortable situations in assessing his gender. The plot surely takes a twist when Cal makes the decision to run away from home, and hitchhikes all of the way to San Francisco where he meets the queerest character of all in terms of non normative, Bob Presto. When we learn that Cal begins working for Bob’s strip club called the Sixty-Niners, and swims naked in a pool where people can watch him through peepholes. At the club Cal is referred to as “Hermaphroditus”, and befriends the other workers there that all are dealing with other sexuality issues. The queer plot of Fun Home is just as surprising as it is mainly revolved around memoirs of her father. In the beginning we learn about Alison’s journey from a little girl to young adulthood while she comes to terms with her lesbian sexuality, and shortly after learns of her fathers homosexual...
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...AS Media Studies Assignment AS Media Studies Assignment Week 2, Task, page 15 (Genre) Description of Law and order In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses such as rape, torture, pedophilia and child-abuse are dealt with in New York City, by a special unit of detectives of the police department known as the Special Victims Unit. These crimes are then passed on to the courtroom for prosecution. Description of Law and order In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses such as rape, torture, pedophilia and child-abuse are dealt with in New York City, by a special unit of detectives of the police department known as the Special Victims Unit. These crimes are then passed on to the courtroom for prosecution. Law and order is a crime-based drama, with a mixture of ‘court-room’ and ‘detective’, TV series, mainly shown on channel five. By reading the description of the show, I immediately realised that this is a show that is based around the world of crime and how the crime is dealt with within the city of New York. It starts from finding who the criminal is and then we follow the story up to the prosecution in the court room. Words such as ‘courtroom, ‘rape’, ‘victim’, ‘detective’ immediately grabs the reader’s attention, giving us the impression of the type of genre this TV series is. The picture that accompanies the description also shows that the genre of this series is crime as the main detective is pulling out her police badge and is what the...
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