Wednesday Class

Hi Teacher! My classmates and I were thinking of doing the class by posting all the information here in the blog. We divided into groups and each one must develop the different topics. Maybe we can post everything here so that we do not waste necessary time for studying on travelling. Tell us what will be your decision. See you

Some material that might help you!

Hello Everyone,
Here are some fragments from different essays in which you will find quotations and paraphrasing. Remember that these essays were not argumentative, so do not focus on the style used to write them. I hope you find them useful!

Introduction

  

Title: Postcolonial Characteristics Dealt with in Hanif Kureishi’s Stories My Son the Fanatic and Intimacy

Postcolonialism is not an easy term to be defined and more than one definition can be found. According to Claudia Ferradas, it “can be defined as ‘what grows out and away from colonialism”. It is also a term used “to refer to those countries which achieved formal political independence from Britain”. It “impli(es) awareness of the simultaneity of a colonial and postcolonial status”. Postcolonialism can be expressed in varied manners: one of them is literature. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin postcolonial literature “is concerned with writing by those people formerly colonized by Britain, though much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers” (Ashcroft; 1). This term includes all the cultures that have been influenced by imperialism since the moment of the colonization to the present (Ashcroft; 2). One of the representative authors of postcolonial writing is Hanif Kureishi. Kureishi is an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker whose work is mainly based on postcolonial issues. In order to analyze these Postcolonial characteristics, two different stories will be discussed in this paper, the short story My Son the Fanatic and the novella Intimacy. When analysing My Son the Fanatic and Intimacy, many Postcolonial characteristics may be found in them. Diaspora, Place and Displacement, and the Voice of the Subaltern are aspects that are present throughout these stories and consequently because of the existence of the concepts mentioned above, the idea of hybridity gets life.

Body Paragraph

Title: Patriarchy, Feminism and Homosexuality. Issues dealt with in Ali Smith’s novel Girl Meets Boy 

Thesis Statement: Imogene seems to be content with her life and seems to have a clear opinion on society. However, a series of events makes her strong ideas vanish and raises in her a totally different set of values that contradict almost everything she has been used to believe.

By the beginning of the story, Imogene seems to be a very modern¹ person. She is a single young woman who has a successful career being part of the creative team at Pure, a local bottled water company. She has a good salary and has great opportunities to keep on climbing professionally. Apparently, she is breaking all the standards culturally imposed by “the patriarchal order” system mentioned by Stephen Bonnycastle in his article called Feminist Literary Criticism. Bonnycastle explains that this “patriarchal order” system has built the misconception that “men are more likely to be active, productive, and assertive while women tend to be passive, receptive, and inquiring.” He also claims that “men and women often fulfil their assigned roles in social groups without knowing that an assignment has taken place”, because since a very young age they have been taught to play this roles”. He also says that “when they reach adulthood there is no doubt that men will “know a lot about working within power-structures, systems of rules and hierarchies, and that demands of big organizations may well be relatively familiar and congenial to them” while “women, in contrast, [will] have a lot of experience with friendship and the various feelings that arise in intimate relations, but feel incompetent, threatened or repelled by the negotiating and competition that occur in big organizations”.

Taking into account Imogene’s case, she could be taken as one of those exceptional cases mentioned by Bonnycastle in which the rule is not applied, and the woman has been able to get rid of the standards imposed by society. However, when the reader gets to learn a little bit more about Imogene, they are confronted with a totally different woman. This Imogene the reader gets to know is the very personification of the patriarchal society. She is not able to establish the relationship between her being the only woman with a hierarchical position in her company and the patriarchal society in which she lives; she is deeply concerned with the impression she leaves on others and she completely disapproves of her sister Anthea’s new lesbian relationship with Robin.

As said before, Imogene considers herself fortunate for being the only woman part of the creative team at Pure and for earning a good salary. She thinks that the reason why no other woman is part of that team is because probably none of them deserves to be in it:

Thirty-five thousand, very good money for my age, and for me being a girl, our dad says, which is a bit sexist of him, because gender is nothing to do with whether you are good at a job or not. It is nothing to do with me being a woman or not, the fact that I am the only woman on the Highland Pure Creative board of ten of us – it is because I am good at what I do. (57)

Even though Imogene questions herself the reason for being the only girl part of the creative board in the company, she convinces herself that that reason has nothing to do with men keeping the hierarchical jobs for themselves in order to have the power. Even though she criticises her father for being sexist, she is not able to go deeper in her thoughts and decides to believe that she is the only girl worth this job.

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 ¹Modern: using or willing to use very recent ideas, fashion, or ways of thinking. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman Group Ltd, 1995; p. 917.

Title: CHICANOS IN THE BORDERS. DISPLACEMENT AND LACK OF BELONGING

Thesis Statement: 

Even though Woman Hollering Creek and Hunger of Memory are both written by Mexican-American writers, they are very different books because Cisneros and Rodriguez’s styles are very dissimilar. Some of the differences that can be mentioned about these narratives are the characters that the stories are focused on as well as the use of language devices and the intended audience they write the books for.

The intended audience is another topic to focus on. According to Marcela Raggio in her article Mujeres en el Margen: Identidad Cultural y Femenina en Woman Hollering Creek, de Sandra Cisneros, Sandra Cisneros makes clear that even there might be other possible readers, she potentially writes for a Hispanic audience. Different from Cisneros, Rodriguez writes for the white American citizen. He explains to the reader that he “knows” Hispanics will not read his work due to a lack of schooling.

I seek a kind of forgiveness-not yours. The forgiveness of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student. I wish that they would read this. I doubt they ever will.

The complexity of the language is another factor that makes these two pieces of art irreconcilably different in their styles. In Woman Hollering Creek Cisneros makes use of a great amount of Spanish words and phrases, and as Raggio says, when the texts are written in English the reader is able to see the “tropicalization” of them, so they sound as if they were written in Spanish. Rodriguez does make use of Spanish words and phrases sometimes to offer the reader a closer and more accurate atmosphere to the situations, but the complexity of the language he uses makes the narrative a text in English without a doubt.

English Language IV Paper II

October 25^th, 2019

Select one of the essay prompts below and write an argument essay.

1. Alienation and Separation from Society
2. Nature vs. Nurture in the development of a human being.

Remember to use the stories read and/or the films seen during the year. Be sure to label which option you chose at the top of your paper. Do not forget to include a counterargument and refutation.

Your paper is due November 1^st

In Cold Blood - Part 3 - Question 1-5

Part III - ANSWER

1. Why is Floyd Wells concerned when he hears the news of the Clutter murders?

Floyd was shocked because he knew the Clutters. He had worked with Herb many years ago. He was part responsible for their murder. He was the one who told Dick about the Clutter family when they were in prison.

2. How does fate come up again in Floyd’s encounter?

Floyd is a clear example of the butterfly effect theory, where a butterfly moving its wings can produce  a storm in other part of the planet. In this case, the simple action of talking about the Clutters, with the purpose of making friends, results in the massacre of the family. Floyd triggered the events that made Dick decide to assault the Clutters, and this, to call Perry who was the one that killed all the Clutters when Dick shrank back.

3. Why doesn’t Floyd want to tell his story to the KBI?

He was afraid to say that Dick and Perry were the murderers because he might be killed if someone in the prison find out he talk to the police (“moles” are killed in prison). Or maybe, he could be consider as an accessory to the crime and punished for being part of the crime.

4. How does Marie, Dewey’s wife, react when she sees pictures of Dick and Perry?

She saw that Perry has eyes that showed sensitivity and wickedness. But she had another impression when she saw Dick`s eyes. Marie felt afraid because his eyes showed pain and hatred and they reminded her a traumatic event of her childhood. Finally, she regretted for seeing the pictures.

5. How do the Hickocks feel about their son? In what way do they “cover” for their son? In what ways do they recognize and admit his mistakes?

Dick`s parents didn`t want to believe that their son could have committed such crime. They saw him as an athlete, a husband, someone intelligent. For them, Dick wasn`t the problem, Perry was a bad influence for him. The parents blame Perry for all their problems.

They knew Dick was resentful for not going to college or living well because they couldn`t afford that. When Dick went back from prison for stealing, he was another person, he was always angry.

Dear ALL,

Debo contarles que me pasó algo que espero no les pase a ninguno de ustedes. El jueves cuando llegué de San Carlos, me senté a trabajar y la computadora no me respondió más y cada vez que intentaba prenderla aparecía el cartel de la foto y no se podía hacer más nada. Ayer la llevé a Compumundo, que es donde la compré y me dijeron que puede que me autoricen el cambio directo (otra vez) o que la deba llevar al servicio técnico oficial para que le cambien el disco. Eso significa que todo archivo, programa, etc., que tenía en la compu lo he perdido. Por suerte tengo un respaldo de la mayoría del material hasta antes de las vacaciones de invierno, pero todo lo que he trabajado nuevo desde julio en adelante lo he perdido, incluidas las correcciones de sus ensayos. Es en esa reflexión donde me dio terrible depresión; pensar en que iba a tener que volver a hacer la exhaustiva corrección de cada uno de sus ensayos me provocó muchísima angustia, considerando que me lleva en promedio dos horas por ensayo.

Es por eso que he tomado una decisión que en alguna medida los va a beneficiar (más allá del trabajo que van a tener que hacer). Les voy a pedir que revisen y coediten sus última versión del ensayo. Este último mes hemos trabajado varios aspectos de la escritura de ensayo que los puede ayudar a mejorar sus versiones. Igualmente aquí va un listado de los errores que en general están cometiendo en sus redacciones:

• Dificultades de colocación (muchas): hace falta mucho trabajo con el “collocation dictionary” y luego confirmar que el significado de la expresión refleja el mensaje que queremos dar.
• Problemas de estructuras paralelas: esto lo hemos trabajado últimamente, así que pueden beneficiarse de lo visto.
• Mala elección en la categoría gramatical de las palabras: por ejemplo, a veces asumen que cierta palabra es un sustantivo pero resulta ser que es un adjetivo. Lo mismo puede pasar con los verbos y a veces hasta con los adverbios.
• Selección de términos que no expresan lo que ustedes desean: Este fenómeno se da particularmente porque nuestro español interfiere, y como la palabra es parecida en ambos idiomas, asumimos que significa lo mismo.
• Coherencia en la redacción de los párrafos: cambio de foco, discusión de aspectos irrelevantes en la fundamentación de algo que plantean(thesis statement o topic sentence).
• Cohesión: selección de un conector erróneo.
• Coherencia en los tiempos verbales.

Recuerden que este no es un ensayo argumentativo, así que no necesitan agregar un contraargumento.

Por último, debo decirles que algunos ensayos (no todos) iban a quedar desaprobados, porque las debilidades que presentaban eran demasiadas para una tercera versión, es por eso que les decía que a algunos los iba a beneficiar en mayor medida. Espero que de toda esta experiencia negativa, logremos transformarla en una positiva y que al menos todos los ensayos vuelvan a mi en condiciones de ser aprobados. Estoy segura que cuando ustedes mismos los vuelvan a leer y a revisar van a encontrar muchísimas cosas que van a necesitar ser cambiadas. Si el compañero coeditor hace también un trabajo a conciencia, las ventajas de esta nueva versión van a ser muchísimas.

Les pido que me envíen sus nuevas versiones durante el día lunes 14.

Cuento con su comprensión y paciencia ¡Muchas gracias a todos!

In Cold Blood- questions 6-10 Part III

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Part III

6. How do the views about Dick differ between the community and his family?

Dick is just the opposite. He is a good guy in front of his family and of course in the community his is a terrible human being. He has like a double personality. Outside his house he is cruel and without empathy.

7. Why do you think the agent does not mention the murders in talking with Dick’s parents?

Even though, there are lots of proves Dick and Perry killed the Clutters, the agents have to check and investigate everything to finally conclude they did it.  Moreover, Nye could not mention to Dick’s parents about the murders yet they were aged people, it could be dangerous for their health.

8. What is the Hickocks’ impression of Perry? Why is this ironic?

His parents love and care about him so much. Her mother tries to protect him against Perry. They do not even know their son. For the Hickocks Dick is a good guy. It is ironic because once Dick is outside his house he becomes in another person. But it is even more ironic because he did received love, care, health care, food, a house, a warm bed where to sleep. He had everything to become a good human being and he did not. Perry is more humble and empathic than Dick. Even though, Perry never had all what Dick could have had access when young.

9. Why do you think the agent does not take the gun with him?

I think it was because at the moment to hold it he realized it was the gun used to kill the Clutters. It causes Nye a sort of bad feeling.

10. Why had Mr. Bell stopped to pick up Dick and Perry? How is he later saved? (Is this another

example of fate?)

Mr Bell was bored and drowsy and looked at them like “O.K. boys”.

It is a coloured military stood on the road and Mr Bell stops to give him a ride.

I think Mr Bell is a very lucky person. He is about to be killed and some other unknown person saves his life. It is unbelievable.  

Hi people.  I found this interview. It is very interesting to know Truman a bit more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiSiNgaQBYE

The second one is interesting as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Ua-NSiL2Y