...Deyanna Johnson The effects of Alice Walker’s life on her writings Alice Walker is a short story writer, poet, and author of children’s books. Her writings have become a favorite and popular read in the literary community. Some of her writings have transcended from the written version into screen writings. Drawing from her emotions, Walker’s writings range stem from personal pain, abortion and suicide. er HerAlice Walker writings were influenced by her unusual childhood, her literary mentors, and struggle with self- esteem. Initially, Alice Walker’s writings were influenced by her unusual childhood. Alice Malsenior Walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah (Grant) Walker. Walker’s family included five boys and three girls. She was the youngest of her eight siblings (Alice Walker para1). By the time she was eight years old, her family knew she would rather play more exciting games with two of her brothers than spend time playing with her dolls. The children sometimes acted out stories from the westerns. As a little girl, Alice Walker also went through hardships in life. At the age of eight, Walker was accidentally injured by a BB gun shot in her eye by her brother. Her partial blindness caused her to withdraw from normal childhood activities and begin to write poetry to ease her loneliness. She found that writing demanded peace and quiet, but these were difficult things to come by when ten people lived in four rooms....
Words: 2259 - Pages: 10
...November 2, 2014 Alice Walker After conducting research on several of my favorite authors, I selected Alice Walker’s life and works as the focus of this paper. Walker's accomplishments are substantial. Her novel, The Color Purple, won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award for fiction. She has authored many other critically acclaimed works, and is recognized as a leading author in the literary world. As I began to dig deeper, however, I found the real reason that I chose to concentrate on this individual. Alice Walker is an African American woman who expresses herself and her life experiences in her writing. I feel like I am connected to the themes and characters Walker develops in her stories. I feel like I am connected to Walker herself. I have been broken in some kind of way or another. I have been abused physically and mentally. Walker has not allowed her struggles to get in the way of her success or happiness. I chose to write about her because she is a woman who faced profound struggles in her young life. She came close to giving up because of a childhood accident and an abortion. Alice Walker was a fierce and determined woman who stayed committed to her goals. Alice Walker faced many challenges. She was one of seven children. She was born in poverty to sharecropper parents on February 9, 1944. Her father was the grandson of slaves. Her father did not want her to get an education in fear that it would destroy their relationship. Walker's mother enrolled...
Words: 1158 - Pages: 5
...In this book Alice Walker, she takes us on a journey of her life experiences while using her profound love for animals as a lens of observation. The Georgia born Pulitzer Prize winner uses deep metaphors and symbolisms to deliver a unique yet playful approach to her understanding of some of life’s greatest mysteries. Her “Chicken Chronicles” are a remarkable way the author choses to relive and retell her life story. Walker’s love for chickens extends beyond mere husbandry and develops into a lifelong relationship in which she often refers to them as her children. “I called out to them, as I do: Hi Girls, it’s Mommy” (Walker, 2011) she freely writes without care of what anyone thinks of her somewhat strange infatuation with her chickens. Her memoirs are filled with subtle explanations of life’s most misunderstood concepts. She deconstructs, love, loss, family,...
Words: 1544 - Pages: 7
...Alice Walker and Maya Angelou are two contemporary African-American writers. Although almost a generation apart in age, both women display a remarkable similarity in their lives. Each has written about her experiences growing up in the rural South, Ms. Walker through her essays and Ms. Angelou in her autobiographies. Though they share similar backgrounds, each has a unique style which gives to us, the readers, the gift of their exquisite humanity, with all of its frailties and strengths, joys and sorrows. Tragedy struck both of these women at the age of eight. Ms. Walker lost her sight in one eye. Ms. Angelou was raped. Each described the incident as part of a larger work. Ms. Walker related her experience in the body of an essay published in her book, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Ms. Angelou told her story as a chapter in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Although both wrote about their traumatic experience, the way each depicted the incident was distinct and seemed to be told for very different purposes. Alice Walker reports the facts to the reader with short sentences written in the present tense. She chooses words which elicit a forceful emotional response from her audience. For example, in telling how her brothers were given BB guns and she was not, Ms. Walker writes, "Because I am a girl, I do not get a gun. Instantly, I am relegated to the position of Indian." The word "relegated" causes the reader to be irate and indignant....
Words: 1078 - Pages: 5
...as a privilege, but in " Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self", by Alice Walker, beauty is not in one's appearance but in the strength one builds throughout life's challenges. Alice Walker's life is filled with adversity, from her early childhood up to adulthood. Many times her will is tested, and every time she perseveres and builds her strength as a woman. As a child, she was injured in an accident with her brothers while she was playing a game with them. She explains the incident when she says, "I feel an incredible blow in my right eye. I look down just in time to see my brother lower his gun" (Walker). This moment changes her life for ever, for she is damaged both physically and mentally. She is first only concerned with her physical beauty, as this is the standard in society. Her distress is captured when she says, "For six years I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head" (Walker). Beauty in this sense is only on the surface, but as she matures she realizes this is not true beauty....
Words: 356 - Pages: 2
...Alexita Professor Jamie ENC 1102 August 4, 2013 Alice Walker Section 1 Biography According to Michael Mayer, Alice Walker, one of the best-known and most highly respected writers in the United States, was born in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. Her parents were sharecroppers, and money was not always available as needed. At the tender age of eight, Walker lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. This left her in somewhat a depression, and she secluded herself from the other children. Walker felt like she was no longer a little girl because of the traumatic experience she had undergone, and she was filled with shame because she thought she was unpleasant to look at. During this seclusion from other kids of her age, Walker began to write poems. Hence, her career as a writer began. Walker found the love of her life in 1967, a white activist civil rights lawyer named Mel Leventhal, and they married him in 1967. A year later she gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca. It was not until she began teaching that her writing career really took off. She began teaching at Jackson State, then Tougaloo, and finally at Wellesley College. Walker was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and spoke for the women’s movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation. She also started her own publishing company:...
Words: 2381 - Pages: 10
...My paper will focus on how Alice Walker’s The Color Purple questions the notions of gender. In the article “Feminism” Carolyn Perry states that “Feminism differs from the women’s movement in that it moves beyond the political and economic issues at heart of the women’s movement…, such as tearing down the hierarchical structure of sex and gender roles and changing the way people view men, women, and gender”(255). She believed that it wasn’t a such thing as “a women’s place”(255). In The Color Purple Alice Walker shows us that women can over come oppression and become stronger if they believe they can. Unlike Celie in The Color Purple, Alice Malsenior Walker had a fairly happy childhood. She was the last of eight children born by her parents. She began 1st grade at the age of four and was very successful. She was very happy with her life “…until an accident (a brother shot her with a BB gun) blinded her in one eye and made her feel ugly”(Taylor2614). After the accident her grades began to fall because she was unhappy and the children at her school began tease her. After having surgery on her eye, She regained her confidence and graduated valedictorian of her class. The Color Purple took place in a time where women believed that the man was in charge. Back then women weren’t allowed to express their opinions. In the first sentence of The Color Purple, Walker shows us how Celie’s stepfather would rape her and threaten her to do what he wanted. “You better not never tell no...
Words: 1137 - Pages: 5
...[pic] Renae Evans 04-27-2010 “ Push” by Sapphire Enriched and nurtured in the tradition of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Sapphire creates a womanist text that depicts a new voice of the African-American woman in Push. It is a troubling and intriguing novel narrated from the viewpoint of an uneducated, sexually abused Harlem adolescent, Precious Jones - ill-treated, deprived, fuming, obese, loathed, ignored and hence self-taught, direct, naive, raw as being sensible, worthy and truly humane. Precious Jones, the teenage protagonist, suffers unbelievable adversities for her young age — raped by her father (when she was only seven years old), ill-treated and badly beaten by her mother. At the start of the novel, Precious Jones is pregnant for the second time with her father's child. She says, “Don’t nobody want me. Don't nobody need me. I know who I am...ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for"(p. 33). This obviously shows how much has she hates herself. Precious believes her life would be different if she were a white girl. She thinks white girls have all imaginable happiness a girl could possibly have. Precious realizes her physical appearance made people to mistreat her. Even if she sits obediently in class every day, she experiences-"I always did like school, jus' seem school never did like me"[(p. 38). In fact the school principal tells her teacher to renounce her, saying "Focus on the ones who can learn"(p...
Words: 1071 - Pages: 5
...comparison of the double oppression in the two protagonists’ marriages.................. 6 2.1 The diminishing and isolation of Celie and Antoinette/Bertha........................................ 6 2.2 The upholding of the white man’s norm ........................................................................ 14 Conclusion............................................................................................................................... 21 References................................................................................................................................24 1. Introduction 1.1 Purpose and main questions The basic focus of this essay is to study the main character Celie and her life conditions in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple...
Words: 10734 - Pages: 43
...Running Head: LITERARY WORK ENG 125 January 9, 2011 “The Welcome Table” by Alice Walker and “Country Lovers” by Nadine Gordimer are two literary poems that have similarities and differences. They are very different in their style, character and format. I think the most common thing that these two literary poems share is they both have a strong and excellent characterization. “Country Lovers” has events and circumstances of behavior and situations that “The Welcome Table does not have. Emphasizing the similarities in an essay defines its comparison and when you emphasize the differences in an essay you are defining the contrast. As I discuss these essays in my writing, you will note that there are some similarities but they are totally different. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast two literary stories, “The Welcome Table” by Alice Walker and “Country Lovers” by Nadine Gordimer. These two stories overall message is “engages the reader in inter-racial issues from a sociological and moral perspective” in “The Welcome Table”. When we look at the “Country Lovers” I think the message “engages the reader in the same inter-racial issues from a sociological but the perspective is psychological.” (p.69) These two pieces are similar in that they are both written in third person and they both have an effect of social and racial discrimination involved in them. As the author of both pieces intentions are to show...
Words: 2359 - Pages: 10
...Everyday Use”, was published as short story collection written by Alice Walker. Walker’s novel represents the focus on women’s lives and interconnects of the past and present representing the protagonists that is portrayed as victims, variously manipulated and used by husbands and lovers, white society, or their own depleted self-esteem. This story had an unhappy ending with hard-won truths also the protagonist had confidence in defending her family’s legacy. In the time that the story is set, black American life and identity were undergoing the transformation of action from enduring slavery, violence, and discrimination that there after led to freedom, and “Everyday Use,” hinged on the tension created when the two worlds came together....
Words: 2065 - Pages: 9
...http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-3-2005-65287.asp Keynote Speakers Top Motivational Speakers for Events in Singapore and Asia It is unbelievable the amount of influence that Oprah Winfrey has had over the lives of millions of people all over the world. She has become a demi-god in America. There are people who are ready to worship the ground over which she walks. She has lived the Great American dream, a veritable tale of rags to riches with the right amount of glamor added to it. Born in 1954 to unmarried parents, Oprah was raised by her grandmother on a farm with no indoor plumbing in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Oprah's childhood turned into a nightmare because of sexual abuse that she suffered. After suffering abuse and molestation, she ran away and was sent to a juvenile detention home at the age of 13. In 1968, at the age of 14 she gave birth to a premature baby who died soon after birth. An incident of this nature can devastate the entire life of a person. But Oprah Winfrey came out of it a stronger and fiercely determined individual. Her story is one of unrelenting focus and determination. Oprah's tryst with the world of entertainment began when at the age of three she began speaking in church. By the time she was a teenager Oprah was touring the churches of Nashville, reciting the sermons of James Weldon Johnson. Crowned Miss Fire Prevention in Nashville at 17, Winfrey visited a local radio station, where she was invited to read copy. She was so good that she was...
Words: 3488 - Pages: 14
...Specimen Papers and Mark Schemes for English Literature For first AS Examination in 2009 For first A2 Examination in 2010 Subject Code: 5110 Contents Specimen Papers Assessment Unit AS 2 Assessment Unit A2 1 Resource Booklet Assessment Unit A2 2 1 3 9 15 25 Mark Schemes Assessment Unit AS 2 Assessment Unit A2 1 Assessment Unit A2 2 29 31 61 95 Subject Code QAN QAN 5110 500/2493/0 500/2421/8 A CCEA Publication © 2007 Further copies of this publication may be downloaded from www.ccea.org.uk Specimen Papers 1 2 ADVANCED SUBSIDIARY (AS) General Certificate of Education 2009 English Literature Assessment Unit AS 2 assessing The Study of Poetry Written after 1800 and the Study of Prose 1800-1945 SPECIMEN PAPER TIME 2 hours INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES Write your Centre number and Candidate Number on the Answer Booklet provided. Answer two questions. Answer one question from Section A and one question from Section B. Section A is open book. INFORMATION FOR CANDIDATES The total mark for this paper is 120. All questions carry equal marks, ie 60 marks for each question. Quality of written communication will be assessed in all questions. 3 Section A: The Study of Poetry Written after 1800 Answer one question on your chosen pairing of poets. Heaney: Opened Ground Montague: New Selected Poems 1 John Montague and Seamus Heaney both write about the Irish past. Compare and contrast the two poets’...
Words: 25332 - Pages: 102
...CONTENT Exercise 1. 2 Exercise 2. 5 Exercise 3. 8 Exercise 4. 11 Exercise 5. 15 Exercise 6. 18 Exercise 7. 21 Exercise 8. 25 Exercise 9. 28 Exercise 10. 31 Exercise 11. 34 Exercise 12. 37 Exercise 13. 40 Exercise 14. 43 Exercise 15. 46 Exercise 16. 49 Exercise 17. 53 Exercise 18. 57 Exercise 19. 61 Exercise 20. 65 Exercise 21. 68 Exercise 22. 72 Exercise 23. 76 Exercise 24. 80 说明: 题目来源: Exercise 1-24:所有题目都来自官方真题 其中: Exercise 1-14:我们将OG和PP2中的题目编排为前14个Exercise, 每个Exercise都是按照GRE考试中阅读部分的出题习惯编排,即每个Exercise 10个题目,形式为(1长+2短+1逻辑 or 4短+1逻辑)。 Exercise 15-24:我们将近年来考试中出现的文章和老GRE中极为接近现行出题风格的文章编排为后10个Exercise,每个Exercise 13个题目左右,形式为(1长+1短+2逻辑)。 练习方法: 建议大家第一遍做能够限时练习,按照考试的要求每个Exercise的大致难度和应该用的时间都标在了前面。没做完6个exercise可以做一个回顾总结,将文章反复做一遍,总结单词,长难句,文章的出题规律,句子之间的关系。 答案显示方法: 如果你打印出来练习:参考答案见P 页 如果你在电脑上练习:windows 系统:Ctrl+Shift+8;Mac系统:Command+8 Exercise 1. 20min While most scholarship on women’s employment in the United States recognizes that the Second World War (1939–1945) dramatically changed the role of women in the workforce, these studies also acknowledge that few women remained in manufacturing jobs once men returned from the war. But in agriculture, unlike other industries where women were viewed as temporary workers, women’s employment did not end with the war. Instead, the expansion of agriculture and a steady decrease in the number of male farmworkers combined to cause the industry to hire more women in the postwar years...
Words: 36604 - Pages: 147
...critical theory today critical 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...
Words: 221284 - Pages: 886