...For this essay, you will undertake a similar project. Through your personal narrative, you will investigate some misunderstood or misperceived facet of American culture (technology, entertainment, consumerism, etc.) or life (family, illness, disability or any kind of difference, etc.) in order to persuade your readers to think differently. In this week’s discussion, we examined the various strategies used by authors to persuade their audiences. We noted that these authors did not simply assert a thesis and then defend or “prove” it; rather, the authors invited us to explore and think further about a topic. However, as readers we weren’t taken on an unfocused or disorganized journey: * The focus (or what we might understand as the “thesis”) of each essay was clear and woven throughout the essay. * The focus was well supported through appeals to logic, emotion, and through the writer’s expertise on the topic. * The essays were organized in persuasive ways. * The writers carefully crafted their language and tone to appeal to the audience. Title- A prospective from an average American becoming changed and labeled with PTSD. The year is 2006 in Tucson, AZ during the holiday season. Going through the motions of every day life as a Career Airman in the USAF. After finishing a long week of work on a Friday, my phone rings from my Supervision. I was instructed to report to the shop ASAP. As I’m driving back towards the office thoughts are running...
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...Synopsis Born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Morrison has won nearly every book prize possible. She has also been awarded honorary degrees. Early Career Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder, but held several jobs at once to support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music, and folklore. Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. "When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read," she later told a reporter from The New York Times. Dedicated to her studies, Morrison took Latin in school, and read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949. At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in literature. She majored in English, and chose the classics for her minor. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her education at Cornell...
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...Joshua Marston's superior and shattering Maria Full of Grace manages two of the hardest tasks a narrative film can achieve. For one, it tells a story of personal misery, shot through with strong ideological overtones, without reducing its protagonist to a mere symbol or its screenplay to a simple polemic. Moreover, it is the rare film that starts out very strong and gets increasingly better. Add into the mix that this is the Brooklyn-based Marston's debut feature, directing a new actress in nearly every scene of an all-Spanish-language movie—none of the cultural backgrounds or political dilemmas represented in the movie reflect Marston's own biography or experience—and Maria Full of Grace seems all the more impressive. To top it all off, at the time of this writing, Maria trails only the mass-marketed martial arts opera Hero as the highest grossing foreign-language release of the year. When aesthetic dexterity, cultural sensitivity, and positive audience response unite this pointedly, staying at home just shouldn't be an option. This exquisite and profoundly humbling film is as good as they come. Marston has reported that Maria Full of Grace was inspired by his acquaintance with a neighbor who came to Brooklyn as a drug "mule," the horribly but unavoidably cruel colloquialism for women, usually young girls, who are recruited to smuggle drugs into the U.S. (and, no doubt, elsewhere) by transporting them inside their bodies. These women swallow pellets hard-packed with cocaine...
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...Motherly Love In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved the mother-daughter cycle of perceived abandonment, betrayal, and recovery is played out through Sethe and her relationships with her mother and daughters. Sethe's past is one of pain and betrayal in which she was deprived of a loving mother and mistreated as a slave on the plantation known as Sweet Home. Her agonizing past precipitates her overbearing desire to love and protect her children in the present. Unwilling to relinquish her children to the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma that she endured as a slave, she tries to murder them in an act that is, in her mind, one of motherly love and protection. Sethe, however, does not understand that her swift decision is conveyed as selfish and overbearing in the minds of her family and community, suggesting that her maternal instincts were poorly communicated to the people around her. The ghost of Beloved (Sethe’s murdered daughter) haunts her until her living daughter, Denver, assumes a maternal role of protection and love. Morrison uses the haunting past of slavery to reveal that Sethe’s scarring experience with personal abandonment may be the reason she cannot fully communicate with her daughters and correctly assume the maternal role in her family. The inability for parents to effectively nurture their children first occurs in Sethe’s life when she realizes that her own mother may have abandoned her on the slave plantation. She remembers that her own mother was hanged...
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...in the ‘safe’ formats of film and of established folk legend. Irving’s tale, written in 1820, also works with antiquity, but in a different manner: it lives out colonial cultural anxieties of Irving’s present, as he seems to be concerned with constructing archetypes of folk and with placing folk culture in the new American literary landscape. Examining the two versions of the tale, then, provides a fascinating peek into the transformation of concerns and values in America from Irving’s nineteenth century landscape to Burton’s twentieth (on the verge of twenty-first) century. Burton makes several significant moves that modify the basics of Irving’s tale, frequently at the cost of the folk elements of Irving’s version. The frame narrative of Irving’s story—the tale, part of a series titled “The Sketch Book,” begins with the preface “Found among the papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker—is completely done away with (Irving 41). What is more, the second narrator of the story, who is narrating to Knickerbocker “at the corporation meeting of the ancient city of the Manhattoes,” is also disposed of (Irving 61). There is no narrator at all in Burton’s film, and the action that...
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...The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and critics of the English novel share. The first is that the burgeoning of capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes were mainly responsible for the development of the novel. The second is that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition. [note 1] I want to propose instead that, as surely as it marked a response to developing class relations, the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [note 2] My thesis is that from its inception, the novel has been structured not by one but by two mutually defining traditions: the fantastic and the realistic. [note 3] The constitutive coexistence of these two impulses within a single, evolving form is in no sense accidental: their dynamic interaction was precisely the means by which the novel, from the eighteenth century on, sought to manage the strains and contradictions that the sex-gender system imposed on individual subjectivities. For this reason, to recover the centrality of sex and gender as the novel's defining concern is also to recover the dynamism of its bimodal complexity. Conversely, to explore the interplay of realist and fantastic narratives within the novelistic tradition is to explore the indeterminacy of subjectivities engaged in the task of imposing and rebelling against the constraining order of gender difference. ...
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...BOOK REVIEW Title and Bibliographic Citation: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. Things fall apart is a book written by Chinua Achebe to serve the purpose of answering inaccurate stereotypes which colonial countries have about Africans. Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian born author who is widely known and recognized as the father of African literature. He was born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, a large village in Nigeria and recently passed away on March 21st 2013 at the age of 82 years old. He was the child of a protestant missionary and received early education in English. His upbringing was multicultural where he got to understand some of the cultural aspects of the inhabitants of Ogidi who still had some aspects of Igbo culture. Achebe was one of the founders of the Nigerian literary movement formed in the 1950’s which had a goal of identifying traditional oral culture of its indigenous people. In 1959 Chinua Achebe published the book things fall apart. The book was to serve as a response to Joseph’s Conrad book “heart of darkness” which portrayed Africa as a primordial and cultureless foil for Europe. Achebe sort out to set the record straight and clear the air from any misconceptions that Africans were a primitive, socially backward and language-less. He sorts to give room to the understanding of the African culture and give a voice to the underrepresented at a time when the continent was still suffering from colonialism. In the book Achebe...
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...Otherness: Essays and Studies 1.1 October 2010 Haunting Poetry: Trauma, Otherness and Textuality in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days Olu Jenzen Early conceptions of trauma are intimately linked not only with modernity but specifically with the height of industrialisation (Micale and Lerner 2001). This is converged in the opening of Specimen Days particularly in the image of an industrial accident at the ironworks where a young man is killed by the stamping machine. His young brother, replacing him at the machine after the funeral, then experiences an apparition of the dead brother still trapped inside the machine, which leads him to believe that all machines house entrapped ghosts of the dead. Writing on the Victorians’ anxieties about internal disruption caused by the advent of the railway, Jill Matus (2001, 415) has pointed out that, Freud himself remarked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), [that] there is ‘a condition [which] has long been known and described [and] which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of traumatic neurosis’ (12). Freud’s remark brings to the fore the traumas of the industrial age as both individually and publicly experienced and negotiated. This condition of trauma as private and public, individual yet also societal is held in tension throughout Cunningham’s novel. Reflecting on the otherness of trauma and its vexed relationship to representation...
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...Jimmeria Jones Professor Jenkins English 1102 December 9, 2008 Beloved: Memories, Manifestation, and Malice “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water” …“nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by” (53). In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Beloved appears out of nowhere like a lost soul stumbling and stammering until she made her way to her predisposed destination the property of I24. The moment that Sethe see’s Beloved her bladder fills to capacity, “She never made the outhouse. Right in front of the door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided was endless” (54). This to me symbolized a woman’s water breaking before she gives birth; it is evident to me that Beloved is a manifestation and representation of Sethe’s inner most thoughts, feelings, secrets, and past traumatic experiences and Beloved has returned to shed light on Sethe’s past, present, and future self through painful memories. In a conversation about Beloved Morrison states, “she is a spirit on one hand, literally she is what sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead” (Darling 247). Sethe feels immediately drawn to Beloved after she states her name; “Sethe was deeply touched by her sweet name; the remembrance of glittering headstone made her feel especially kindly toward her” (56). There are...
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...Movies we see at theatres, on television, or home video are typically narrative films. They tell stories about characters going through experiences. But what are they really about? What is the content of a film? DIGGING DEEPER: FOUR LEVELS OF MEANING Recounting the plot of a movie, telling what happens, is the simplest way to explain it to someone else. But this is neither a film review nor a film analysis. It’s merely a synopsis that anyone else who sees or has seen the movie will likely agree with. This level of content may be called the referential content, since it refers directly to things that happen in the plot and possibly to some aspects of the story that are merely implied by the plot. In John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), four men from the city go on a weekend canoe trip that unexpectedly becomes a life or death struggle for survival of man against man and man against nature. Some characters survive, others don’t. Most films can be analyzed more thoroughly to reveal deeper levels of meaning. A review (perhaps 400-1200 words) typically includes personal impressions and evaluations of a movie’s content and techniques. A good review may be subjective, yet still touch superficially on topics that might be explored in more detail in a longer formal analysis. An analysis (perhaps 1200-12,000 words) attempts to determine how the film actually uses various cinematic techniques and elements of film or narrative form to make a viewer react in a certain way...
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...arguments usually question or celebrate the transgressive potentials of the book (Giroux; Mendieta), or address issues of masculinity brought into the fore by their literary and cinematic representations emergent in the same decade (Tuss; Friday). However, few, if any, have addressed the literary aspirations of the text and its author. Although none of the approaches to the thematic concerns of Fight Club are unjustified, in the argument that follows I will suggest that conclusions drawn and critical judgments passed have been hasty, and not only failed to take into account the formal aspects of story-telling, but that the narrative features of Palahniuk’s text have largely went unexplored, and constitute a blind spot of the reception. Critics condemning or acclaiming the novel, and, indeed, many a cultic reader of Palahniuk ignored Fight Club as a literary narrative, and have inadvertently been repeating the catchphrases of the text, either reinforcing or trying to undermine what they have understood as their meaning. I see the significance of Palahniuk’s fiction and the literary event of Fight Club’s publication in somewhat different terms. Palahniuk’s emphasis and continued insistence on minimalism suggest that his fiction is properly understood as belonging to a literary tradition whose evaluation remains troubled and, for a large part, unsettled. Nevertheless,...
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...Nicole Renard and Larry LaSalle. Tension is created- he states his intention of killing Larry, but at this stage we do not know why. A flashback to the war introduces the theme of heroism- Francis has a Silver Star Medal, although he refuses to believe himself heroic – and reveals his love for Nicole. Language use My name is Francis Joseph Cassavant and I have just returned to Frenchtown in Monument and the war is over and I have no face. – compound sentence – pared gives only what he considers as essentials metaphor ‘ I have no face’ why is this effective? simile ‘ my nostrils are like two small caves’ – why is this effective? Narration follows the patterns of speech – how? What do we need to be aware of with a first person narrative? Characters Francis – disfigured and hiding, ‘I am like the hunchback of Notredame, my face likee a gargoyle and the dufflebag like a lump on my back’ – why is this allusion effective? Mrs Belander – how do her actions show attitudes towards veterans at this time in America? Structure Starts with himself and full description; then hints at people and places giving small details about his past which we need to start to build on… Setting From his bedsit Francis is able to see St Jude’s church, The Wreck Centre and has already alluded to the war. These settings are...
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...Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk HEIKE HÄRTING N HIS REVIEW of Anil’s Ghost, Todd Hoffmann describes Michael Ondaatje’s novel as a “mystery of identity” (449). Similarly, Aritha van Herk identifies “fear, unpredictability, secrecy, [and] loss” (44) as the central features of the novel and its female protagonist. Anil’s Ghost, van Herk argues, presents its readers with a “motiveless world” of terror in which “no identity is reliable, no theory waterproof” (45). Ondaatje’s novel tells the story of Anil Tessera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist working for a UN-affiliated human rights organization. Haunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural dislocation, Anil takes up an assignment in Sri Lanka, where she teams up with a local archeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to uncover evidence of the Sri Lankan government’s violations of human rights during the country’s period of acute civil war. Yet, by the end of the novel, Anil has lost the evidence that could have indicted the government and is forced to leave the country, carrying with her a feeling of guilt for her unwitting complicity in Sarath’s death. On one hand, Anil certainly embodies an ethical (albeit rather schematic) critique of the failure of global justice. On the other, her character stages diaspora, in Vijay Mishra terms, as the “normative” and “ exemplary … condition of late modernity” (“Diasporic” 441) — a condition usually associated...
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...aspects: the double sense of time in the novel and the style of magical realism. Finally, putting all these elements together, I shall address the question posed at the start. I would like to suggest that this novel does, in fact, have something very insightful and important to reveal about the social and political realities of the world it depicts and that this theme may be difficult for North Americans fully to recognize. One Hundred Years of Solitude as an Epic It seems clear to me that, in any conventional sense of the literary term, we are dealing here with an epic work: a long narrative fiction with a huge scope which holds up for our inspection a particular cultural moment in the history of a people. The novel is the history of the founding, development, and death of a human settlement, Macondo, and of the most important family in that town, the Buendias. In following the historical narrative of...
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...The Necklace vs. The Story of an Hour Pamela Richard ENG 125 Lesa Hadley May 11, 2012 The Necklace vs. The Story of an Hour A short story, “The Necklace” (“La parure”) written by Guy de Maupassant in 1884 and a poem, ‘The Story of an Hour” written by Kate Chopin in 1894 are literary works that are very comparable yet are different. The two women, Madame Mathilde Loisel and Louise Mallard, portrayed in these literary works are protagonists who have trouble because of conflicting expectations imposed on them by society. Both Mathilde Loisel and Louise Mallard want something more than what their lifestyle offers them. During the time when the authors wrote these pieces, the social behaviors showed gender suppression/oppression. This essay will compare and contrast elements of content, form, and style between two different literary works. Both authors chose the theme of gender roles in marriage. During the time when the authors wrote theses pieces, the social behaviors showed gender suppression/oppression. The nineteenth century was impacted by the industrial revolution which caused a gap in gender roles, especially in the upper and middle classes (Radek, 2001). Men and women were thought to have completely different natures. Men were considered to be powerful, brave, rational and independent. Women were considered weak, timid, emotional, and dependent. Those differences separated their functions in society. "Men were thought to have natures suited to the public...
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