...I am a first generation American. My father works from 5 am to 6 pm as a taxi driver. He works every day, for more than a decade. He doesn’t have to work so hard, he’s the son of an Indian nobility and from a political family, yet he left it all behind, so that his children can build their own future and legacies in America. Personally being touched by struggles that immigrants and low income family’s face, I will never forget my roots, my parents struggle, or the peers and professors that have influenced me, but I am looking to the future, and promise to build myself a great one, properly starting at Northwestern. I lived in Evanston for thirteen years, and consider it home. Through the community and participating in MRSEC, I understood...
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...history of Americans taking advantage of the fact that they have created a system of oppression and discrimination against black people. The narrative is expressed in the form of a letter addressed to his son, through a collection of stories and experiences, from the author’s perspective as someone who lives under the repressive system. Coates’ principal message to the audience is that despite the fact that American society is set up in opposition to the success of black people, black people must not stop struggling to continue to fight for equality. The first takeaway I got from this book is that it has a largely negative focus on the relationship between “Americans who believe that they are white,” and black people. From my personal perspective, while it is important to understand the negative, Coates failed to provide the audience with a balance. There are some positive instances in the relationship between white and black people, in...
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...Minimalist contentions: Fight Club Introduction Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most influential American fiction writers who emerged in the 1990s. His debut novel, Fight Club (hereafter: FC) reached cult status after the film adaptation by David Fincher was released in 1999, and widespread and divided critical reception was soon to follow. Much of the current debate about Fight Club focuses on the political implications of the text, but most often recourse to it by way of referencing the film. 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...
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...Lower East Side Memories : A Jewish Place in America By HASIA R. DINER The Lower East Side and American Jewish Memory I'm Jewish because love my family matzoh ball soup. I'm Jewish because my fathers mothers uncles grandmothers said "Jewish," all the way back to Vitebsk & Kaminetz-Podolska via Lvov. Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13 I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual. —Allen Ginsberg, "Yiddishe Kopf" The poet Allen Ginsberg, born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, returned in his later years to a narrative style of expression, shifting gears from the anger and fire of his early career. In this poem from 1991 he also touched down again, after a long hiatus spent exploring Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, upon some Jewish themes, as a way of remembering the world of his youth. He described that world in one poem, "Yiddishe Kopf," literally, a Jewish head, but more broadly, a highly distinctive Jewish way of thinking, based on insight, cleverness, and finesse. That world for him stood upon two zones of remembrance. The world of eastern Europe, of Vitebsk, Lvov, and Kamenets-Podolski gave him one anchor for his Jewishness. Thai space of memory gave him a focus for continuity and inherited identity, tied down by the weight of the past, by family in particular. The other, the Lower East Side, nurtured and...
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...stuwritten for the dents per group. Philadelphia “Conbersaychunal,” he says, allowing the fat vow- 2 Inquirer for more than els of his accented English to collide with the sawedtwenty years. off consonants. I tell him that will be fi ne, that I’m familiar with 3 Barrientos was born in Guatethe conversational setup, and yes, I’ve studied a bit mala and raised of Spanish in the past. He asks for my name and I in El Paso, Texas. Her first novel, Frontera Street, was supply it, rolling the double r in Barrientos like a pro. published in 2002, and her second, That’s when I hear the silent snag, the momentary Family Resemblance, was pubhesitation I’ve come to expect at this part of the exlished in 2003. Her column “Unchange. Should I go into it again? Should I explain, conventional Wisdom” runs every the way I have to half a dozen others, that I am Guaweek in the Inquirer. This essay originally appeared in the collectemalan by birth but pura gringa by circumstance? tion Border-Line Personalities: A Do I add the humble little laugh I usually attach New Generation of Latinas Dish to the end of my sentence to let him know that of on Sex, Sass & Cultural Shifting. course I see the irony in the situation? We selected this reading because This will be the sixth...
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...African American literature is surprising, captivating, and spirited. Once you start reading a story it is easy to get caught up in the tale being told. The descriptive nature of the works makes it easy to relate to them. Throughout my readings thus far in the class I have noticed some common themes that reoccur in many of the stories and poems. Of course slavery was a very common topic but there were others such as inequality between the races and sexes, injustice and resentment, the black identity, and a strong faith and religion. Even though the words can be separated in the end they all come back together. There were many narratives written by fugitive slaves before the Civil War and by former slaves in the postbellum era. These narratives document slave life from the perspective of first-hand experience. The stories they tell are dark and ugly. The authors like Douglas and Jacobs reveal the struggles, sorrows, aspirations, and triumphs of slaves in absorbingly personal story-telling. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. In it she describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. She also recounts her life in slavery in the context of family relationships with her escape and her struggle to free her children. Fredrick Douglas who wrote Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas, an American Slave, Written by Himself...
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...First of all, reading Pero Dagbovie’s What is African American History? has been an eye-opener regarding the historiographical struggles and the methodological and conceptual aspects of doing African American history properly. While I have come across some of Dagbovie’s work before, and covered parts of the historical fight to integrate the history curriculum in primary and secondary schools during the mid-twentieth century in my M.A. thesis, I gained a lot of new insight by reading Dagbovie’s illustration of the coming of age of the field and the various debates along the way. His work made me think harder about what African American history is, and what it is not. This has helped me a lot in developing and redirecting my own research focus over the last couple of months. I think that sometimes the scarcity of Black sources or the difficulties to access them, compared to white official and public records, can increase the danger to fall back into narrating the story...
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...ENGL124 Literature Analysis Nov.11 2014 The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel written by Mohsin Hamid, set in the year following 9/11, constructed through a conversation between a Pakistani named Changez and an unnamed American in a café in Lahore.. The Reluctant Fundamentalist uses a variety of narrative strategies that contribute to the novel’s atmospheric world. This essay is going to focus on the metaphorical and symbolic techniques used in the novel and analyze the connection between them. It will also elaborate how does the metaphor relate to the first-person narrative in the novel and how do these two methodologies work together to derive the deeper meaning of the author’s intension. After analyzing the use of metaphor in the book, we could see better the real meaning and power of metaphor used in literature. The book is riddled with allegory and metaphor. Take names as the most significant example in the novel. First of all, let’s talk about the name “Changez”. While several reviewers have assumed that “Changez” is too obvious a name for a character in this situation, Hamid has pointed out that it doesn’t signify “change” but is instead “the Urdu name for Genghis, as in Genghis Khan.” He elaborates: It’s the name of a warrior, and the novel plays with the notion of a parallel between war and international finance, which is Changez’ occupation. But at the same time, the name cautions against a particular reading...
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...rhetorical strategies such as using a narrative, imagery, and fictional and relatable stories. Louv states “our experience of natural landscape ‘often occurs within an automobile...
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...Assignment 1 Summary and Personal Response to “Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim By Monguue Tee Professor, Dr, Atia Yasmeen Course: English Composition 115 Date: January 15, 2013 Suki Kim who came from Korea, tells in this essay that is named “Facing Poverty with a Rich girl’s Habits” about new immigrant comes to America, How can she absorbs new environment, difference of culture and wealth is important or not. Writer has a few most important points in this essay. First of all she wants to answer wealth is important or is not? After her father bankruptcy, her life is very difficult and they flow to America without any penny. One day you will be rich but another day you will lose all of your things. Lost thing is not big a problem. Once she flew from Korea, she lost everything such as home, friends, relation and wealth but she might satisfy now, because she has new friends, a new home, and a new job. Our forefather told me that “If you lost the things, it is not a problem, if you lost the ethic, it’s a problem, If you lost your health, it’s big a problem”. I agree with that. Secondly, Illustrated in essay that different culture, social, life style and character between Korean and American students. For example, when the teacher entered in classroom, no one batted an eye but in Korea students and environment of school are different. Another important point of writer, however she became citizenship of America, she celebrates Korean national...
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...call his name. In this poem, identity is not seen as something that is solid and concrete but as something that is situated and constructed by others, a glimpse of poststructuralist view on identity. Recently, language learning has been seen as participation and negotiation of self (see Higgins, forthcoming; Kinginger, 2004; Lam, 2000; Morita, 2004; Ohara, 2001; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; and Solé, 2007 among others). The trend is resonated in the growing interest in language learner identity and the studies in narratives. In this paper, a case of heritage language learner will be investigated upon the theoretical frame of poststructuralism. Narrative inquiry will be used to analyze how she negotiates her learner identity. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: First, by looking at the struggle a language learner makes to acquire her heritage language, I reclaim the centrality of identity in defining heritage language learners. Second, to widen the horizons of narrative studies to the cyber space as it provides an ample source of easily accessible data and it has become one of the commonplace media of daily communication. Heritage Language Learners and Identity To refer to the Heritage Language Learners (HLLs), various terms have been implemented such as ‘native speakers,’ ‘quasi native speakers,’ ‘bilingual speakers,’ or, from the dissatisfaction with the prior terms, ‘home background speakers,’ and ‘heritage language speakers’ (Valés, 2005: p. 412). There has not yet been...
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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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...Whenever I think of the events that have occurred in the past, I always seem to remember more tragic events than the blissful moments. Even in literature, the tragedies are more remembered than other stories. For example, the story of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most notorious plays, despite its appalling ending. Authors have made it a point to sell tragedy in order to make money. However, my perspective on that opinion has been changed. I read The Great Gatsby during my sophomore year in high school as a part of an American literature class. By the end of the book, I realized that no matter what happens in life, it will still keep going and I should only have to look at the optimistic part of it. For some reason, I felt sympathy for Gatsby,...
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...youth networks in Congo for personal development and youth empowerment, a national mentor and international mentor with Aspire Foundation which aiming to make a difference to one (1) billion women by 2020. I have chosen this work because...
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...How can one consciously make an effort not to do this, perhaps one can also reduce comments and actions that lead to racism? First one must understand where it all begins. In the Ted Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares her personal story to show the audience how freely one can succumb to the perils of stereotyping, without even realizing it. Tanzina Vega also illustrates this in her New York Times article “Schools’ Discipline for Girls Differs by Race and Hue,” where she reports on information from a sociological study that exposes the difference in how a girl is punished based on the shade of her skin color. Additionally Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay “Letter to My Son” demonstrates many stereotypes as he writes a very personal piece passing on his knowledge to his 15-year-old son on several important themes including consequences from generations of stereotyping and his observations of the...
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