Generally speaking, the two most frequently used genres in literature are fictional and non-fictional. Having said this, fictional and non-fictional literature are distinct regarding their purpose as well the literary devices they use. Literary devices are specific language methods which writers use to form text that is clear, interesting, and unforgettable. Fictional literature, for instance, is something that is made up; however, non-fictional is factual. Furthermore, non-fictional works of literature such as literary essays usually convey a message using literary devices that differ than those used in fictional literature such as short stories, which are meant to amuse its readers. Literary essays uses literary devices such as description, …show more content…
The narrator of the story is a young, black girl name Sylvia and the story is also told from her perspective. The setting is not clear. Perhaps it started in Harlem and then to downtown Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and the time of the story took place is also unclear. Bambara uses a great deal of characterization to describe the characters in the story. For example, Bambara describes Miss Moore as “black as hell” (Bambara 330), “cept her feet, which were fish-white and spooky” (Bambara 330), and “looked like she was going to church” (Bambara 330). She later tells us that she’s been to college and her state of mind is she believes it’s her responsibility for the children’s education. The plot started when Miss Moore rounded up all of the children by the mailbox. Then she gets the kids in a cab and took them to Fifth Avenue to a big toy store where the rich people would shop. The story then continues with the children and Miss Moore in the toy store and the kids looking around and noticing they can’t afford anything. Which will soon end the plot with a lesson that society is not fair, “that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to purse happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?”(Bambara 330). Hence, the lesson Miss Moore is trying to teach these …show more content…
The literary devices used in the literary essay are description, definition, examples, narration, compare and contrast, cause and effect, classification and division. On the other hand, the short story uses narrator, setting, characterization, plot and perspective. Lastly, both the literary essay and short story convey life-learning lessons. “In Groups We Shrink” sends the message through examples and description while “The Lesson” uses narration and
The authors state, “Genres in literature are categories of writing recognized for their patterns of organization, their
The short story “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara is about Sylvia and her friends. Sylvia is the narrator in the story; Sylvia is a black girl who grows up in Harlem. She talks about how a women name miss Moore moves down on her block. Miss Moore is an educated woman who always dresses up properly and she’s “black as hell.” She always volunteers to take Sylvia and her cousin Sugar to educational events. People in the neighborhood thought that Miss Moore was weird but saw the opportunities for their kids. So they let their kids go with her, but Sylvia weren’t learning, on the opposite she was taking advantage of Miss Moore. One day while Miss Moore was taking caring of the kids, she started to quiz them on arithmetic. Kids started begging her
The poverty that poor black Americans experience is often different from the poverty of poor whites. It is more isolating and esoteric. It fans out of family homes and inundates the entire neighborhood; the streets, the schools, the grocery stores, the community centers. A poor black family, in short, is much more likely than a poor white family to live in a neighborhood where many other families are poor. Creating what is called the "double standard" of poverty. “The sense of privilege that he [Marks], a multi-generation white class guy has to share his wisdom with all of those ‘poor black socially-orphaned children out there in the West Phillies of the world’ is astounding” (DNLee 256). Assuming that those children have no direction is a misconception that many white privileged Americans assume. And that assumption is why the life chances and opportunities of people of color in the United States are limited as compared to whites. Place continues to be a defining characteristics of the opportunity structure. Children growing up in more privileged neighborhoods often ponder what they will do when they grow up; as were poor children ponder on if they will even have the opportunity to grow up. The privileged are so blind that even they do not realize it, and they do not see that others are not privileged. As Cinderella’s privileges and opportunities were taken from her, her chance at the ‘good life’ was too. The element of the good life, however defined, is only accessible to those who are
"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara is not just a spirited story about a poor girl out of place in an expensive toy store, it is a social commentary. "The Lesson" is a story about one African-American girl's struggle with her growing awareness of class inequality. The character Miss Moore introduces the facts of social inequality to a distracted group of city kids, of whom Sylvia, the main character, is the most cynical. Flyboy, Fat Butt, Junebug, Sugar, Rosie, Sylvia and the rest think of Miss Moore as an unsolicited educator, and Sylvia would rather be doing anything else than listening to her. The conflict between Sylvia and Miss Moore, "This nappy-head bitch and her goddamn college degree" (307), represents more than the everyday dislike of authority by a young adolescent. Sylvia has her own perception of the way things work, her own "world" that she does not like to have invaded by the prying questions of Miss Moore. Sylvia knows in the back of her mind that she is poor, but it never bothers her until she sees her disadvantages in blinding contrast with the luxuries of the wealthy. As Miss Moore introduces her to the world of the rich, Sylvia begins to attribute shame to poverty, and this sparks her to question the "lesson" of the story, how "money ain't divided up right in this country" (308).
Literary; associated with literary works or other formal writing; having a marked style intended to create a particular emotional effect. Term; a word or phrase used to describe a thing or to express a concept, especially in a particular kind of language or branch of study. Device; a thing made or adapted for a particular purpose. Literary terms/devices is defined as the typical structures used by writers in their works to convey his or her messages in a simple manner to the readers. When employed properly, the different literary devices help readers to appreciate, interpret and analyze a literary work. Hello, I am Miya Cole and today I will explain to you my four literary terms/devices.
One of Miss Moore's defining qualities is her intelligence. Her academic skills and self-presentation is noticeable through her college degree and use of “proper speech” (Bambara, 385). Miss Moore also makes her intelligence evident from the methods she uses to teach Sylvia and the other children. Unlike planting them in classrooms, she takes them out on trips to show them the real world. Despite all the insults she receives from th...
Miss Moore has been to college and she feels responsible for the teaching of the important issues to the young people in her community. However, the fact that she resides in the same neighborhood as the children displays that she too has missed some opportunities in life to advance herself as far as living situations and finances although she ha This sentence sounds a little weird. You might want to say "despite having" instead of "although she has" s a college degree. Mercedes shows that she is most well off financially when she expresses how she wishes to revisit the toy store, F.A.O. Schwartz when she receives her birthday money. The other characters including Sylvia, Sugar, Flyboy, Big Butt, Q.T., Junebug and Rosie Giraffe are more categorized into a low class society which satisfies the reason that they reacted the way that they did What is the reason they acted the way they did? Include a little more context clues. when they were outside of the toy store. Because of the social economic status, the children, especially Sylvia and Sugar felt very uncomfortable to enter into the expensive toy
“The Lesson” actually turns out to be a journey of discovery and responsibility for the children. The story starts and coincidently ends at the mailbox. The mailbox may represent a place where mail and information are sent and received. From the mailbox, the story switches to a taxi ride where Miss Moore gives Sylvia five dollars to pay for the cab. The taxi is a luxury that the children or their parents could not afford. Sylvia is not quite ready for the responsibility of handling the money and shows it when she decides not to tip the taxi driver. Sylvia also fails to give the change from the taxi ride back to Miss Moore; this was another test of responsibility that Sylvia failed. In the end, Miss Moore allows Sylvia to keep the money as a gift that Sylvia would too proud to take any other way. After the Taxi ride, the children realize they are on Fifth Avenue because of the fancy clothes people are wearing. Sylvia says white people are crazy as she notices a woman in a fur coat in the middle of the summer. The children next stop outside FAO Swartz where they just look in the windows first. FAO Swartz is not a store the children or their parents would be able to afford to shop in, and Miss Moore lets them look until the children start realizing the prices of the things in the window. This shows Miss Moore’s intelligence, and she does it to
Here, Sylvia identifies Miss Moore as an adult with "nappy hair" (Bambara 658). This is a suitable dialect for Sylvia, who also resides in a New York ghetto, is a working-class black girl about twelve years to fourteen years of age, and has got a robust feminist mindset. AAVE provides realism and a sense of humor to Sylvia's narrative. Furthermore, AAVE suits the story's themes, one of which is that the black children in the story have to to find out about the world beyond their ghetto and another that wealth is unequally and unfairly distributed in American society (Heller 279). In "The Lesson," just about all of the have-not children in need of an education speak AAVE. This dialect highlights the children's gap from mainstream bourgeois way of life and economic
The narrator Sylvia and the children in her impoverished neighborhood are prisoners in a dark cave, which is the society that encompasses ignorance and puppet-handlers. “The Lesson” begins with Sylvia as she talks condescendingly about her neighborhood of Harlem, New York: “Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup. Quite naturally we laughed at her… And we kinda ha...
In "The Lesson" by Toni Bambara, the narrator, Sylvia, is confronted with conflicting feelings about class, wealth, and social injustices. Throughout the story, there are various points where we see her development into a girl that sees the world for how it really is. MIss Moore, the woman that makes this all possible, is the primary target of Sylvia's bitterness. It seems, though, that this dislike is unanimous within the group, "...we laughed at her...we kinda hated her too...." Nonetheless, when the kids were around, Miss Moore would not miss a chance to teach them life lessons, the most important one (for Sylvia, at least) comes when the group is taken to an expensive toy store in Manhattan.
The book taking place during and after the period of the civil war there was a lot of tension concerning Blacks. Some of the values Mrs. March teaches her girls is the importance of never trying to be something there not; the unimportance of material possessions versus mental possessions; and that regardless of what the world told them, they are equal to men and therefore deserve equal rights.
In the story, the reader discovers the hard truth that equality wasn’t the norm during the 1920’s--even in untamed, unsettled Alaska. There was hatred amongst the white people towards the Alaska Natives, and the kindhearted person Anne was didn’t understand that. Anne saw all children and adults as equal to their peers and didn’t see any reason why anybody couldn’t be included with everyone else, especially in the schoolhouse. Anne even invited uneducated adults into her schoolhouse to join her young students because she felt that anyone that wanted to learn should be allowed to. Something interesting about this was how much trouble Anne got herself into by doing this. The school board of Chicken was furious with Anne for letting the natives be in the same room as their caucasian children. There were several quarrels between Anne and the school board throughout the story, but Anne never let the board win.
Bambara wrote it from this point of view that people can see what it is like to grow up without a formal education and hardships these kids have to overcome. She wanted to also show the distinct personalities, characteristics, and habits that are a result from their environment. She uses it to contrast different social classes. Bambara also included Sylvia’s resentment towards Miss Moore to show how people of a lower social class are disrespectful towards educated people. But at the end, she felt confident that she can achieve her goals no matter where she came from, even if she did not expect Miss Moore to teach her a lesson.
Students have been writing essays since education was formalized centuries ago. There are several formats that they are taught throughout the course of their formal education, two of the most common being; Narrative, and Descriptive. Both of these have distinct characteristics that define them, and while they share many similar qualities and are developed to make the reader immerse themselves in the story. Narratives tend to have the power to capture and persuade on a deeper level than most descriptive papers. Two prime examples are the narrative I Want a Wife by Judy Brady and the descriptive essay Fish Cheeks by Amy tan. While they both do an exceptional job at delivering a lesson Brady’s causes you to think from the beginning, her use of the rhetorical devices such as pathos, ethos, and logos are incorporated with a heavy use of sarcasm and harsh remarks that claws for the reader’s attention.