Redefining Realness, as a whole, is an extremely powerful piece of literature– but I think that (at least for me, personally) the sixteenth chapter of Janet Mock’s novel is the most poignant. The passage opens with Mock’s discussion of how her “decisions are [her] decisions, [her] choices [her] choices, and [she] must stand by the bad ones as much as [she applauds her] good ones. Collectively, they’re an active archive of [her] strength and vulnerability” (Mock 221). There is something incredibly admirable about such a raw admittance, a realization. It forced me to recognize how my own mistakes have shaped who I am today. In order to finance her sex reassignment surgery in Thailand, Mock partook in a pornographic shoot in order to earn the
A sacrifice is a strong action in which one is willing to put a priority before oneself. “Proofs” is an essay written by Richard Rodriguez about a Mexican adolescent teen who narrates the harsh reality of his family members going through immigration. The essay focuses on the differences between the American lifestyle versus immigrant lifestyle. “The Apology: Letters from a Terrorist” is an essay written by Laura Blumenfeld. It’s about how her father was shot by a terrorist. Thirteen years later, she decided to visit the gunman’s country to get an apology to her father, to find out how he feels about the situation, and what happened in his perspective. In both pieces of writing, family is a strong theme that is shown in multiple ways.
What is reality? This is the question Philip K. Dick poses in his book, Time Out of Joint. Dick strategically uses literary devices such as narrative structure and symbolism in order to comment on one’s perception of what is real, and what is fiction. By making “time out of joint” and allowing a shift in moral power within his novel, Dick exposes the feelings of paranoia and insecurity that were experienced during the fifties, when Dick wrote this novel, but implies that there is hope that peace can still be attained.
It is interesting to see how the different Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism are altered by the text they are describing. For example, I have one volume on Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and another for Great Expectations, both of which demonstrate the extent to which the object of critique affects the critique itself, such that “deconstruction criticism” in an intellectual vacuum is something different than when a scholar tries to apply it to a particular text, altering both the text as well as the principles of deconstruction. The Awakening gender criticism takes on a different feel from Great Expectation gender criticism even though they are informed by the same principles, because gender in the early Victorian Dickens is different than in the turn of the century American Chopin. In this way the criticism co-constructs with the primary document something different than both the criticism and the original text. Such a syntheses have produced exciting and innovative ideas, refreshing and reviving works from the tombs of academia. Unfor...
Throughout the course of the semester so far there has been many ethical questions that we have talked about. One is about Jacob Riis and how he adopted a rhetorical position that made him sound like he was agreeing with his audience when presenting the photographs in his book How the Other Half Lives. Jacob Riis used a rhetorical strategy where the text would contradict what the image is portraying. “Its existence was designed to draw the audience’s attention away from the manipulations of the creator and the distortions of the medium, to lull viewers into believing themselves witnesses to an unrehearsed and untagged confrontation with the raw grit of a previously hidden world” (hughes 6). Riis also almost supported the stereotypes that were
Rich, Adrienne. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing for Re-vision." On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New
Also, by completing this project, I have learned you cannot label words out of context to determine its meaning and part of speech. Likewise, when I chose the novel The Awakening, I just picked a sentence that met the 50-word requirement for this assignment. When reading the sentence out of the context of the novel, the meaning of the words in the sentence meant something totally different. Again, this project really has taught me to examine words and sentences in the larger context in order to define the meaning and function. Although I have started to grow gray hair from doing this project, I enjoyed the lesson of wrestling with words in real sentences from a living books. Like Edna, my soul awakens to a new outlook on doing grammar. Kate Chopin’s writing style helped me understand how grammar makes meaning in a sentence, the relationship between words and meaning, and the connection between the structure and meaning of a
Katherine Anne Porter’s stories are brilliant, vivid snapshots of lives, and reveal the foolishness of man. Everyone sees life from their own perspective and bases their actions and thoughts on personal experiences. Some of her characters will never see past their own noses, while others cannot get the courage to change. Reality clashes with dreams in many stories, and can leave disillusionment or despair.
In the poem “Barbie Doll” the speaker take more drastic measures to make herself acceptable to society. In line12 the speaker takes drastic measures to fix herself, “So she cut off her nose and legs.” This action will lead to her death in the end of the poem which would not have happened if her peers did not mock her about the way her nose and legs looked. People are aware of their own imperfections, but when people mock them and do not accept them because of it, that is when the drastic measures of starvation, excessive exercising, and depression can begin. It can happen without the pressures of society, but if society mocks them, it pushes the person further in to a state of
Everyone at some point is bound to experience situations where they question who they really are. This conflict usually arises as a result of either another’s actions or one’s own actions. In the short story “On the Sidewalk Bleeding”, Andy struggles with his self-identity. Furthermore, the barber in “Just Lather, That’s All”, battles with his abilities and image of himself. Therefore, both the barber and Andy face an inner conflict as a result of their struggle of determining who they genuinely are, which conclusively results in how their future will unfold.
“The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was” (Wharton 6). In the House of Mirth, the main character Lily Bart spends her entire life trying to escape this idea of dinginess. On her quest to maintain society’s approval, she denies her true identify along with any hope of ever finding true love and is eventually “blotted out” by this society (Ammons 348).
Novels that are written by pronounced authors in distinct periods can possess many parallels and differences. In fact, if we were to delve further into Zora Neale Hurstons, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, we can draw upon many similarities. Now of course there are the obvious comparisons, such as Janie is African American and poor, unlike Edna who is white and wealthy, but there is much more than just ethnicity and materialistic wealth that binds these two characters together. Both novels portray a society in which the rights of women and their few opportunities in life are strictly governed, usually breaking the mold that has been made for them to follow The Cult of True Womanhood. These novels further explore these women’s relationships and emotions, proving that throughout the ages of history women have wanted quite similar things out life. Similarly they interconnect in the fact that the end of the stories are left for interpretation from the reader. Both these women in these novels are being woken up to the world around themselves. They are not only waking up to their own understanding of themselves as women and individuals that are not happy in the domestic world of their peers, but they are also awakening themselves as sexual beings.
Characterization plays an important role when conveying how one’s personality can disintegrate by living in a restrictive society. Although Kat is slowly loosing her mind, in the story, she is portrayed as a confident woman who tries to strive for excellence. This can be seen when she wants to name the magazine “All the Rage”. She claims that “it’s a forties sounds” and that “forties is back” (311). However the board of directors, who were all men, did not approve. They actually “though it was too feminist, of all things” (311). This passage not only shows how gender opportunities is apparent in the society Kat lives in, but also shows the readers why Kat starts to loose her mind.
Anne Bradstreet’s poem “The Author to Her Book” is her response to having her private poems published without her consent and having them be criticized by people that were not intended to see them. Bradstreet began to see the flaws in her work and wants to fix them but it is too late and they had already been released to the world. This experience by Bradstreet is something that is able to be related to at some extent by most individuals at some point in their life, including myself. In my life I have been forced to endure my fair share of betrayal, negative judgement for things that are out of my control, and developing a sense of dislike for something that I once loved because of influence of the loud opinions of others.
A is a being who does not remember a time where they did not move from one body to the next each night. They have progressively grown to become sixteen years old mentally and inhabit the body of only of those who are teens. The author portrays through A's character that love cannot be constrained or defined to notions of race, gender or nationality. A and Rhiannon love each other notwithstanding the fact that A has no gender. “In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals.” (142). A believes that there should be no limits to loving someone. Everyday displays that love is endless and should not be confined to common notions. Teenagers face struggles to express themselves, making Everyday a great selection of the grade 10 course so they can learn to respect people for who they truly are. A respects the bodies they inhabit, they have rules and limitations set for themselves. A does not use the body in a wrong fashion and does not do anything to impact the person negatively. When they inhabit Rhiannon's body. They did not do anything that she would not want them to do. A is a unique being, they have seen the world from many perspectives and knows the ideology and feelings of other people. A’s interaction with other characters and various experiences gradually shape him into a well rounded character. "I have learned to observe far better than most people" (7). They have experience of life from the eyes of different people. A demonstrates his kind nature by giving everyone the respect they deserve. In the current generation, majority of the teens have problems in respecting the decisions and personality of other people, including Everyday in the Grade 10 curriculum would be
Indeed, Victorian women are molded into the socially calibrated model of The Looking-glass self, a structural theory in which Cooley proposes that people shape their identity largely based on their understanding of how other perceive them, and the social environment thus serves as the “mirror” that reflects desirable images of themselves. According to Cooley, the stages of The Looking-glass self involves imagining how one looks to others, imagining how other are judging her, and finally developing herself through such possible judgement. A hypothesis can be formed here, that Victorian women must develop this looking-glass self by concealing socially or individually unacceptable impulses from their consciousness. In the case of Clarissa, she represses her rather primitive sexual feelings toward Sally for fear of social judgement, and must construct an identity reflective of the feminine qualities desired by the society. But Clarissa’s looking-glass self is quite problematic, because it is only a manifestation of her attempt to repress real emotions. All forms of repression, according to Freud, cause disease within the mind and body— they will gradually boil inside the beings and finally explode. Interestingly, Clarissa never “explodes” her repressed feelings