...In the news, young athletes are only being noticed for their negative attributes; this series highlights young athletes in a favorable light. The black and white images concentrate on the young athletes' positive training regimen and how they can be perceived as positive role models. The black and white contrast helps to provide details in the images that narrate their personal choices to achieve their goals with good, old-fashioned drive and persistence. I would like for the viewer to walk away from this series feeling like they can relate to the beauty and focus of these athletes. This linguistic-based concept body of images of young athletes, between the ages of 12-18, is the primary subject of the youth's desire and drive to succeed in athletics. I illustrated the story and actions of these youths who have the attitude that "they eat, sleep, and breath" for success in athletics. With an illustrative concept, I can communicate the athletes' drive to succeed....
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...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”...
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...Which Essay is Better: A Narrative or A Descriptive? Ever read a story and say to yourself, “What’s happening?” Whenever I read a descriptive essay, that’s what I would say. In this essay I would be comparing and contrasting two types of essays, a narrative and descriptive. I have chosen “Are the rich happy?” by Stephen Leacock 1916 and “Sister Flowers” by Maya Angelou, n.d. By writing my essay, I want to give my views on each and decide which I would rather write. Narrative Essay A narrative essay reflects a personal opinion that is based on your own experiences. This helps you bring a reader into your very own mind and shows him/her the topic you’re writing about through your eyes. Telling a story or event the way it happened for you. It also could provide a sort of lesson or moral to be learned from the outcome of the story as well as what the writer did that contributed to it or not. It’s more on a personal level that any one reading could say that happened to them or that they learned from the story by not doing whatever it was that the writer did. In Stephen Leacock’s “Are the Rich Happy?” the author writes about his experiences with his friends, with of modest income. Most of it, all in his opinion, points out the problems or troubles those with an existential amount of funds in their bank accounts. He goes on to give some examples that he encountered several of his friends going through. “A friend of mine who has ten thousand dollars a year told me the other...
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...These 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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...through Theatre This paper sets out to explore how processes of theatre making employed by The Mothertongue project, provide spaces for women to remap their personal narratives. Mothertongue works from the premise that the development and subsequent performance of stories in theatrical processes affords women the opportunity to re-write and remap their personal narratives and in so doing insert their voices into the landscape of South African Theatre. In an attempt to redress the gender imbalances and androcentricism prevalent in post-apartheid theatre, this paper speaks to the relationship between theatre, liminality and communitas. I am interested in unpacking how collaborative processes of theatre-making provide spaces for women to remap their personal narratives. Remapping in this instance refers to processes of transforming lived experience through story. I address how, through engaging in ritual activities that are central to the stories performed, actors, audiences and the owners of the source stories are invited to physically participate in remapping and transforming lived experience. Linked to this is the choice of form(s) and how this affects or impacts on the performed stories as well as on the construction of performed rituals and ultimately on the processes of remapping personal narratives. I focus specifically on Mothertongue’s 2004 production, Uhambo: pieces of a dream. The production was an integration of theatre and visual art in the form of performances...
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...readers were captivated by his personal experience of being enslaved at age 11, kidnapped from Nigeria, and brought into slavery of a New World in a terror-filled ship. Equiano's tale is viewed as an authoritative description of the villainous Middle Passage, one of the very first narratives from a slave, a story that gave the hatchling abolitionist movement a buzzing moral influence; except it may not be exact. Therein lays the mystery: Because if the gentleman who penned "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African" was not born in Africa, but rather born into slavery in South Carolina -- as Vincent Carretta suggests -- then who was he? Where did he learn to speak fluent Igbo? And how did he obtain such agonizing details about life aboard an 18th-century slave vessel? The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains. . . . The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. (Equiano, 1789) In that lies the controversy: Carretta's findings, detailed in his biography of Equiano, have ignited a blaze in academic life, for the most part among those who have extensively considered Equiano the "black Ben Franklin" all on the weight...
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...Lee's movie Do the Right Thing, my sister and I had a fight over lunch. It was one of those things you do with a lover, or sometimes with a close friend about politics, where the terms you disagree on are too buried to perceive or even to guess, at the time, that they're there. You can be agreeing about all the superficial details and about the largest of generalizations all along--my sister and I both found the film powerfully moving--and still wind up fighting about ... something--one of those disagreements that leave you dissatisfied and unexplainably angry. Her arguments weren't unfamiliar. I had run into very similar concerns, interpretations, and vocabulary in some of the mainstream criticism on the film. But it was only after stewing about our lunch for a couple of days that I began to figure out how completely at odds with the movie I saw was the one she--and those critics--had seen. The more I thought about it, the more I could see that these were no idiosyncratic subjective responses. Rather, our differences were bound up with Spike Lee's mix of styles of representation, which my sister and I responded to selectively and from very different perspectives. While Lee's representation of the Italians was moving and meaningful to her, she could find nothing in his portrayal of the black community that would provide for the same feelings. For, I came to see, while Lee uses to elaborate his white characters methods and narrative and cinematic techniques that have been broadly...
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...WASHINGTON’S UP FROM SLAVERY By VIRGINIA L. SHEPHARD, Ph.D., Florida State University S E R I E S E D I T O R S : W. GEIGER ELLIS, ED.D., ARTHEA J. S. REED, PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, EMERITUS and UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, RETIRED A Teacher’s Guide to the Signet Classic Edition of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery 2 INTRODUCTION Booker T. Washington’s commanding presence and oratory deeply moved his contemporaries. His writings continue to influence readers today. Although Washington claimed his autobiography was “a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt at embellishment,” readers for nearly a century have found it richly rewarding. Today, Up From Slavery appeals to a wide audience from early adolescence through adulthood. More important, however, is the inspiration his story of hard work and positive goals gives to all readers. His life is an example providing hope to all. The complexity and contradictions of his life make his autobiography intellectually intriguing for advanced readers. To some he was known as the Sage of Tuskegee or the Black Moses. One of his prominent biographers, Louis R. Harlan, called him the “Wizard of the Tuskegee Machine.” Others acknowledged him to be a complicated person and public figure. Students of American social and political history have come to see that Washington lived a double life. Publicly he appeased the white establishment by remaining cautious in his charges and demands. Privately he worked tirelessly...
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...Men In Nervous Conditions: An Ignored Matter The men of Zimbabwe struggled to assert the independence of their people against political, cultural and religious colonial pressure (Vembe), but reduced women to silent supporters (Stone 113). This dynamic still holds true on the literary front, where male writers of Zimbabwe, and Africa in general, present to the west male-centered, idealized pictures of traditional women and culture. Women, however, uncertain that men will revalue them, concern themselves with the pressures within the culture (McLeod). For this reason, the men of Africa generally discourage female authors from revealing their gritty perspectives. Further, E. Kim Stone writes, “Under colonialism, female storytellers were excluded from the few powerful positions the British system of colonization allowed in Rhodesia,” suggesting the traditional place of women as storytellers, somewhat ironically, was also suppressed by the colonizers. Only women are interested in revealing the internal pressures of postcolonial Zimbabwe. But these hidden pressures are just the ones that cause the “nervous conditions” in the book titled as such. A female character narrates this text about women, bearing to light women's struggles to be themselves within a constraining environment. But even as critics revel in this rare, realistic portrayal of Zimbabwean women, they seldom explore the significance of Tsitsi Dangarembga's representation of men, too often passing them off as flat characters...
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...non-existent commodity. I have been asked often enough recently, "What do you think about Ebonics? Are you for it or against it?" My answer must be neither. I can be neither for Ebonics or against Ebonics any more than I can be for or against air. It exists. It is the language spoken by many of our African-American children. It is the language they heard as their mothers nursed them and changed their diapers and played peek-a-boo with them. It is the language through which they first encountered love, nurturance and joy. On the other hand, most teachers of those African-American children who have been least well-served by educational systems believe that their students' life chances will be further hampered if they do not learn Standard English. In the stratified society in which we live, they are absolutely correct. While having access to the politically mandated language form will not, by any means, guarantee economic success (witness the growing numbers of unemployed African Americans holding doctorates), not having access will almost certainly guarantee failure. So what must teachers do? Should they spend their time relentlessly "correcting" their Ebonics-speaking children's language so that it might conform to what we have learned to refer to as Standard English? Despite good intentions, constant correction seldom has the desired effect. Such correction increases cognitive monitoring of speech, thereby making talking difficult. To illustrate, I have frequently taught a...
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...Narrative Essay Rough Draft Philosopher Suman Rai once said, “You are the sum total of your life experiences. The more you experience the more interesting your life story gets.” In other words, a person’s individual experiences ultimately bind together to create the collective soul of his or her beliefs and moral values. I have found that people learn life lessons and develop values more from their first hand experiences, than they ever could from being lectured. In example, it is from a personal experience in the seventh grade, that I learned to judge a person not on the quality of their appearance alone but rather by their words and actions. To begin, it is important to understand that I am a visual learner. I tend to process and rationalize...
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...Overcoming through Personal Responsibility: Sojourner Truth Sojourner Truth stated “If women want any rights more than they got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it (Sojourner Truth Quotes).” Sojourner Truth was an African American abolitionist and woman’s right activist from Ulster County, New York. Ms. Truth is famously known for her speech Aren’t I a Woman and The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Woman should be treated equally regardless of their race, education level, and appearance which do not happen in today’s society. First, women should be treated equal regardless of their race. Race is a big issue in today’s society. Racism is discrimination based on the color of the person’s skin color. A person should be judge based on their character not the color of their skin. Sojourner Truth grew up in the century when slavery was popular where was born into...
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... 2017). I believe there is a commonly missed component in those definitions that can create unexpected and unforeseen issues. Often with these issues, one can find misunderstandings, as well as the perpetuation of issues like racism. These problems...
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...Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact trace@utk.edu. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by D. Renee Smith entitled "Peeking Out: A Textual Analysis of Heteronormative Images in Prime-Time Television." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Communication and Information. Catherine A. Luther, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Michelle T. Violanti, Suzanne Kurth, Benjamin J. Bates Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Detta Renee Smith entitled “Peeking Out: A Textual Analysis of Heteronormative Images in Prime-Time Television.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and...
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...theory today A Us e r - F r i e n d l y G u i d e S E C O N D E D I T I O N L O I S T Y S O N New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Lois Tyson Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97410‑0 (Softcover) 0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97410‑3 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Tyson, Lois, 1950‑ Critical theory today : a user‑friendly guide / Lois Tyson.‑‑ 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑97409‑7 (hb) ‑‑ ISBN 0‑415‑97410‑0 (pb) 1. Criticism. I. Title. PN81.T97 2006 801’...
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