The Native Family Versus the Dominant Culture Essay Example for Free

The Native Family Versus the Dominant Culture Essay The current interest in what has come to be called multicultural literature has focused critical attention on defining its most salient characteristic: authoring a text which appeals to at least two different cultural codes. (Wiget 258) Louise Erdrich says shes an emissary of the between-world. (Bacon) I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life. Her stories unfold where native family and dominant culture clash yet rarely blend, a kaleidoscope of uneasy pieces. The reader becomes the mediator, an observer on the edges as two cultural codes (Wiget 258) collide. She creates dyads: shards of interaction as identities reflect patterns from both cultures. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, Louise Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her heritage includes a French-Ojibwe mother and a German father. With encouragement from her father, she learned to write stories and read William Shakespeares plays (Giles 44). Her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs School while her grandparents lived on Turtle Mountain Reservation nearby. She did not study the Ojibwe language or culture until she moved to New Hampshire with her husband, Michael Dorris. She had taking an anthropology class taught by Dorris at Dartmouth, which stimulated her interest in Native American storytelling. Feeling estranged from her family and heritage after moving away, she decided to learn more about the High Plains setting of her stories. (Habich) During her lifetime, Erdrich probably experienced racism or prejudice because of segregation laws in the fifties. A member of the first coeducational class at Dartmouth in l972, she earned an MA in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. (Habich) She worked at a variety of jobs: life guarding, waitressing, teaching poetry in prisons, weighing trucks on the interstate and hoeing sugar beets. Erdrich found urban life different from reservation life when she became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council  newspaper. She raised several children, some adopted, which provided insight and an understanding of human experience from yet another point of view. Louise Erdrich reveals the Native American lifestyle and collects truths common to all races in her books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and novels, The Beet Queen, Tracks, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace. She commented in a 1991 Writers Digest interview: The people in our families made everything into a story. They love to tell a good story. People sit and the stories start coming, one after another. You just sort of grab the tail of the last persons story: it reminds you of something and you keep going on. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break and fall, it gets into you somehow. (Giles 43) Family for Native Americans means living as a tribe where all adults share some responsibility for socializing the children. The extended kinship system connects an individual to all members of the society, either by descent or marriage, or through formal religious or social affiliations. (Encyc of No Amer Indians) In American Horse, Erdrich combines pieces seeking configuration. Erdrichs characters are met the way people in real life are met: you meet them and then you start knowing who their family is and what their background is. (Huey) Set on the North Dakota Indian reservation, Erdrich creates dyads of conflict where characters interface. A mirroring polarity also occurs between two feminine worlds in American Horse. Albertine exists as the mother living in hiding and fear that the authorities will take her son, Buddy. The social worker, Vicki Koob, approaches with clouded notions of what is best for him. In all likelihood, she never has experienced motherhood. Each relates from her culture of inner core values and contradictions. Through Buddy, Erdrich reveals a mother-son dyad. He is the product of the man she had loved and let go. (American Horse l96) Erdrich uses visual imagery throughout the story to reflect what is perceived and what is real. Buddy had been knocked awake out of hiding in a washing machine while herds of policemen with dogs searched through a large building with many tiny rooms. . . .Tss, his mother mumbled, half awake, Wasnt nothing. But Buddy sat up after her breathing went deep again, and he watched. There was something coming and he knew it. (American Horse 196) The reader has sound and visual cues to determine Albertines condition. Is she sleeping or in a stupor? Later the social worker alludes to Albertine as an alcoholic. [But notice that the child only speaks of the sweet scent of powder on his mother, not of alcohol] Buddy is sitting on the edge along with the reader. When Erdrich changed the Buddy character to Redford for a chapter in The Bingo Palace, she included the words that hes been knocked out of a dream where he was hiding in a washing machine. (Bingo Palace 171) providing more insight into how he gained his surrealistic visions. Buddy has a picture in his mind: It was a large thing made of metal with many barbed hooks, points, and drag chains on it, something like a giant potato peeler that rolled out of the sky, scraping clouds down with it and jabbing or crushing everything that lay in its path on the ground. (American Horse 197) In Bingo Palace, it becomes, something like Grandma Zeldas potato peeler providing a concrete connection to Buddys apprehension. Buddys vision reveals that hell be peeled away from his home. Buddys sexual identity also is awakening. He learns about women through Albertine with visual and tactile clues. The confliction further increases since he has created their situation, even though he realizes his importance  in her life. he felt like hugging her so hard and in such a special way that she would say to him, Lets get married. there were also times he closed his eyes and wished that she would die, only a few times, but still it haunted him that his wish might come true. (American Horse 197) The narrative sets up for the dominant white cultures power play, represented by the white social worker, Miss Vicki Koob, two police officers, a tribal officer named Harmony and a state officer, Brackett who have legal papers to take Buddy. They show no respect to Albertine, her maternal or civil rights. The dyad of two women has different visions for Buddy and of human life. One woman will fight for his life; the other becomes more concerned about her hair and sexual excitement with a co-worker. She treats Buddy like a used car: I want to find that boy and salvage him, Vicki Koob explained to Officer Bracket as they walked into the house. Look at his family life the old man crazy as a bedbug, the mother intoxicated somewhere. (American Horse 201) [Notice how she assumes that she can salvage him or that he needs salvaging. She just assumes that she can embrace and hold him and it will be better than the embrace of his mother.] Not one thing escaped Vicki Koobs trained and cataloguing gaze. (Indian Horse 202) Vicki, in her focus on details, misses the family productivity seen in quilts made from salvaged wool coats. She sees only the television sets in various states of repair, and the minimal food in the refrigerator. Never reacting with the compassion of a woman nor a mother, her perception has limited vision. Harmony vacillates in his identity as Indian and member of the white mans world as peace officer. Harmony cannot achieve his own name. Nor is it to be expected that the identity eventually achieved will be associated with  any recognizable single culture. (Caws 372) As a tribal officer who could be counted on to help out the State Patrol, Harmony thought he always had to explain about Indians or get twice as tough to show he did not favor them. (Indian Horse 199) With the battle lines set, Uncle Lawrence comes eye to eye with Miss Koob. The eye bulged impossibly wider in outrage when he saw the police car. But the eyes of the two officers and Miss Vicki Koob were wide open too. (Indian Horse 199) Lawrences vision extends beyond all of them. He must appear crazy to survive even though he knows they will take him away. Erdrich inserts a bit of comic relief and develops Lawrence as a trickster. Its impossible to write about Native life without humor thats how people maintain sanity. (Bacon) Uncle Lawrence wore a thick white corset laced up the front with a striped sneakers lace. His glass eye and his set of dentures were still out for the night so his face puckered here and there, around its absences and scars, like a damaged but fierce little cake. (Indian Horse 199) In the final conflict between Albertine and Harmony, he shows a dreamy little smile of welcome. Albertine appeals to ancestral wisdom, her fathers power and grace: [her father] American horse took the butterfly, a black and yellow one, and rubbed it on Albertines collar bone and chest and arms until the color and powder of it were blinded into her skin. For grace, he said. (204) She removes her belt to defend herself, swinging the turquoise butterfly that  protects from negative energy. A Native American symbol of power, it represents life itself. A personal fetish was usually a crude representation of an object seen in a dream, either by the wearer or by someone who transferred it to him, together with the powers or benefits accruing from the dream (Callahan). She flings her final vestiges of power: Her fathers hand was on her chest and shoulders lightening her wonderfully. Then on wings of her fathers hands, on dead butterfly wings, Albertine lifted into the air and flew toward the others. (American Horse 205) Albertine expects to be shot but Harmony only hits her on the head and leaves her behind. To him she is trouble and not worth taking. The last paragraph sets the scene for the helpless Native American, forced to assimilate into the dominant white culture. Albertine is knocked out on the ground. Miss Koob gives Buddy a candy bar while he rides in the back seat of the police car. Then Buddy reflects: There was no blood on Albertine, but Buddy tasted blood now at the sight of her, for he bit down hard and cut his own lip. He ate the chocolate, every bit of it, tasting his mothers blood. And when he had the chocolate down inside him and all licked off his hands, he opened his mouth to say thank you to the women, as his mother had taught him. But instead of a thank you coming out he was astonished to hear a great rattling scream, and them another, rip out of him like pieces of his own body and whirl onto the sharp things all around him. (American Horse 206) Does Buddy taste the blood of his fallen ancestors from years of domination? Will Albertine rise again to find him? Erdrich leaves the final judgments to the reader in the hopes the story does not play out as it always has before. [Use hanging indents for the Works Cited page see example below] Works Cited Bacon, Katie, An Emissary of the Between World. A Conversation with Louise Erdrich, Atlantic Unbound, January 17, 2001www.theatlantic.com/cgibin/send.cgi?page+http%3A/ . Callahan, Kevin, An Introduction to Ojibway Culture and History http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/ojibwa.html. Caws, Peter. Identity: Cultural, Transcultural and Multicultural. Multiculturalism. A Critical Reader. David Theo Goldberg,Ed. Malden, Massachusetts:Blackwell Publishers. 1994 371-386. Childrearing. Encyclopedia of North American Indians http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_007000_childrearing.htm. Erdrich, Louise. American Horse. Stories from the Promised Land A multicultural anthology of American fiction, Eds. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 1991. 196-296. Erdrich, Louise. The Bingo Palace. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Giles, James R. and Wanda (ed). The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, Incorporated, 1995. Habich, John. Louise Erdrich: 2001 Artist of the Year Star Tribune December 30, 2001. About Louise Erdrich. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/erdrich/about.htm. Huey, Michael, Two Native American Voices: Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Christian Science Monitor, March 02, 1989. http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/getasciiarchive?tape/89/ulouise. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Spillman, Robert. The Creative Instinct. The Salon Interview. (9 July 1997). Wiget, Andrew. Identity, Voice, and Authority: Artist-Audience Relations in Native American Literature. World Literature Today. Volume: 66. Issue: 2.1992, 258.

Prufrock in the poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock Essay -- T.S.

Question Who is Prufrock? The modern propensity for excessive introspection prevents people from living full, active lives. Is this true of Prufrock? Refer to examples from the poem to support your opinion. Answer It is obvious that the excessive and obsessive reflection of self that Prufrock undergoes in the poem, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" written by T.S. Eliot, prevents him from living to his true potential, and this is shown through the poet?s language and his use of poetic devices. ?The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? has some immaculate imagery. T.S. Eliot uses figurative diction to create almost cinematic images in the readers mind, almost like a memory of their own. The imagery creates an incredible mood and atmosphere, and this evokes appropriately vivid feelings and emotions that all the same, feel eerily familiar and appeal to the senses of the reader. This is the case as the reader can relate to the personal feelings of Prufrock. Yet, the individual images, I consider are not the guiding force or theme of the poem. The constant and central theme of the poem is the dismissive tone of the self-cynical persona, Prufrock. I personally believe that the poem, ?The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? contains T.S. Eliot?s perception on modern man, or in other words, the monotony and sordidness of the human condition. I believe he attempts to break the conventional modes of perception of the typical individual which perpetually takes new forms, and makes the reader see the world afresh from a new perspective. He does this by making us aware and engaging us in deeper feelings that we rarely penetrate. Eliot personally feels that modern man has an exiguous view on the quality of life and the truly impo... ...of Prufrock's propensity to move backwards and downwards is suggestive of his nearness to death, and his backpedaling down into Hell. Prufrock himself as stated earlier sees "the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,? while he says in the next line "in short, I was afraid." The point of past tense is also worth noting. With these phrases the audience has to feel pity towards Prufrock and it is through emotions that Eliot makes his point and perception realised in the readers? eyes. In conclusion, as Eliot seemed to think that the modern propensity for excessive introspection prevents people from living full, active lives, Eliot created the story of Prufrock. Through his persona, T.S. Eliot engages his readers with an assortment of emotions. These emotions were successful in allowing Eliot to see his perception of superficial people seen in his reader's eyes.

Drama and Theater Essay

What is drama? What are the similarities and differences between Greek Drama, Renaissance Drama, Kabuki Drama, and Contemporary Drama? Drama is tension. In the context of a play in a theatre, tension often means that the audience is expecting something to happen between the characters on stage. Will they shoot each other? Will they finally confess their undying love for one another? Drama derived from the Greek verb dran, meaning â€Å" to act† or â€Å"to do†, refers to actions or deeds as they are performed in a theatrical setting for the benefit of a body of spectators. Drama is often combined with music and dance: the drama in opera is sung throughout; musicals include spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have regular musical accompaniment (Banham, 1998). Drama was the crowning glory of the Athenian Age. This period has been called by different terms. It has been called the Age of Pericles because Pericles was the ruling power in Athens at the time. It has been also called the Athenian Age because Athens became the white-hot literary center of Greece, and it has been called the Golden Age because the drama flourished during this period. There were three great tragic writers: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the greatest writer of comedy the world has ever produced ( Serrano & Lapid, 1987, p. 26) Drama and Theater The theatre of ancient Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece between c. 550 and c. 220 BCE. It is true that there is much in human nature that loves dramatic presentation, for man loves to imitate other persons. Gestures by a narrator or an orator may be considered dramatic, but these are only disjointed actions; there is a wide step between this and dramatic actions. The Greeks gave the drama as a literary form to the world. The drama of antiquity is very different from the drama as we now know it. It had dignity, nobility, and power. It had little of the spontaneity and easy naturalness of modern plays. The Greek drama was cut up into situations or episodes, and between these episodes were choral recitations of great length. These choral recitations, though they had beauty and power, slowed the action and interrupted the forward movement of the story. The choruses however, were visually attractive. The participants, competed with each other in the splendor of their dresses and the excellence of their singing and dancing (Serrano and Lapid, 1987, p. 26-27). Some example of the Greek drama were the Story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra , by Aeschylus and The story of Oedipus The King by Sophocles (p. 28). Primary in a true appreciation of Renaissance drama is the poetry. The theatre of their day was a poetical one. Rather than being confused by the poetry we find in these plays, we need to understand why the poetical theatre was, and is, superior in expression and more powerful in emotion than a realistic one. Their stage was â€Å"conventional†or poetical while today’s stage is realistic. As an example, in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens Timon is disgusted with mankind, hating all of the supposedly â€Å"decent† people he knows. When confronted by thieves he tells them to go about their work merrily; everyone steals, and he offers examples of thievery: I’ll example you with thievery: The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n From gen’ral excrement; each things’s a thief. (Timon of Athens 4. 3. 438-45). Kabuki, like other traditional forms of drama in Japan as well as in other cultures around the world, was (and sometimes still is) performed in full-day programs. Rather than attending a single play for 2–5 hours, as one might do in a modern Western-style theater, one would â€Å"escape† from the day-to-day world, devoting a full day to entertainment in the theater district. Though some plays, particularly the historical jidaimono, might go on for an entire day, most plays were shorter and would be arranged, in full or in part, alongside other plays in order to produce a full-day program. This was because it was required in kabuki play to get the audience showing different preference that is in either the history plays or domestic plays like a drama, to enjoy during the full-day program. Contemporary Drama was never very popular after World War I, drama in a realist style continued to dominate the commercial theatre, especially in the United States. Even there, however, psychological realism seemed to be the goal, and nonrealistic scenic and dramatic devices were employed to achieve this end. The plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, for instance, use memory scenes, dream sequences, purely symbolic characters, projections, and the like. Even O’Neill’s later works-ostensibly realistic plays such as Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced 1956)-incorporate poetic dialogue and a carefully orchestrated background of sounds to soften the hard-edged realism. Scenery was almost always suggestive rather than realistic. European drama was not much influenced by psychological realism but was more concerned with plays of ideas, as evidenced in the works of the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, the French playwrights Jean Anouilh and Jean Giraudoux, and the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode. In England in the 1950s John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) became a rallying point for the postwar â€Å"angry young men†; a Vietnam trilogy of the early 1970s, by the American playwright David Rabe, expressed the anger and frustration of many towards the war in Vietnam. Under he influence of Brecht, many postwar German playwrights wrote documentary dramas that, based on historical incidents, explored the moral obligations of individuals to themselves and to society. An example is The Deputy (1963), by Rolf Hochhuth, which deals with Pope Pius XII’s silence during World War II. The contemporary drama does not purport to be easy; it insists on a greater understanding of all things pertinent to modern humanity and its relationships to religion, societal order, psychology in order to appreciate its message; however, it critically acknowledges that most of us remain ignorant to all the former. Thus, the drama instructs, irritates, challenges, and begs for intelligence in order to gain from its message. It remains didactic, combined with pleasure, but always wishing to challenge the current notions of authority. References http://www. clt. astate. edu/wnarey/modern_contemporary_drama. htm Banham, Martin, (1998 ed. ). The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378. Serrano, Josephine and Lapid, Milagros, (1987). English Communication Arts and Skills Through World Literature. Phoenix Publishing House, Inc.

Frederick Douglass Essay - 803 Words

Frederick Douglass Essay Frederick Douglass has finally managed to run away from one of his masters to become a free slave, but yet he feels fear and paranoia. As he runs away, he contemplates all the possibilities of him getting caught by slaveholders or even turned in by his own kind. And it upsets him having to pass all the houses and food, but he has no shelter and starves with no food. This in fact heightens the intensity of his fear and paranoia because he is more likely to be caught with no where to hide and having no energy to run because he is starving. In The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, he utilizes things such as parallel syntactic structure, paradoxes, figurative language, and caesuras to help portray his feeling of†¦show more content†¦The paradoxes get people to understand how irritating it is to be passing by all these necessities stay you need to live and survive, taunting you as you pass by. While Douglass is running away, he relates slaves and hunt ing slaveholders, using figurative language, to wild beast and himself to the helpless prey. On page 136, Douglass says â€Å"†¦as hideous crocodiles seize upon his prey!† He says this because he feels so defenseless that he feels like a little animal going to be eaten. With all the slaveholders and there guns and all slaves that might turn him in, he doesn’t really stand a chance with no where to hide and running out of energy. In addition, on page 137 he says â€Å"†¦famished fugitive is only equaled by that with which monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist,† In this he basically saying it is only a matter of time before they find him and take him in. He can’t really run from them with how hungry he is, he has no energy and no hope that he could out run them if he tried. On pages 136 and 137, caesuras are applied multiple times throughout these pages to conduct a sense of his worry and anguish. He says like à ¢â‚¬Å"†¦in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay -perfectly helpless both as to the means of defense and means of escape-â€Å" (Douglass 137) The breaks leave you kind of hanging because you don’t know if at the end of the next break he could be caught or even shot. And that is where the worryShow MoreRelatedFrederick Douglass Essay817 Words   |  4 PagesAfrican-American man Frederick Douglass wrote his famous speech, â€Å"The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro†, America was in a time of great distress. It was the year 1852, and the view of abolitionists was quickly spreading. It was the time of both provocative literatures such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as important resolutions, such as the Dredd Scott decision, showing the contrast between views at the time, both positive and negative towards slavery. 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