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.

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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.