Rhetorical Analysis On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Before she met her, Adichie’s roommate, felt enormous pity for her and did not believe the two of them could be similar in any way simply because she was African. Adichie questions how things would have been different on their first encounter had her roommate heard of all the positive influential people making a difference in Nigeria. The undeniable truth is, a single story has the power to both deprive and empower people. In “The Danger of a Single Story”, Adichie captivates her audience and convinces them that many stories matter. The rhetorical strategies she chose to use for her argument ensured she presented the most thought provoking, impactful speech.

There is a common consensus among them that a meaningful world can always be projected not through a process of mythos-making but rather through the operation of various versions of the same story in a certain text or the interaction of the text itself with other texts within it. Intertextuality has particularly permeated the theoretical framework of literary journalism. Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes are among the major critics who seek to give a thorough definition of the term, “intertextuality.” According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of inter-subjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (66, Original italics). It is obvious that this definition aptly recapitulates the main characteristics of intertextuality.

When Orleanna reached her hometown of Bethlehem, Georgia with Adah, the Americans viewed Orleanna as the weird lady and town crazy. While the residents of the town were interested in news from outside the local area, they remained certain that Orleanna was no longer a “normal” person. Kingsolver shows a bit of all of that in the text before and immediately around “...my barefoot mother glaring at the ocean.”(637) People living in American cities generally don’t walk around outside barefoot if they have the choice. This expands on the meaning of the novel by showing how judgemental Americans can be over appearances. This further expands on the meaning by showing the contrast of how little the Congolese care for others’ appearances when compared to the American view.

When thinking of a historical figure, many imagine a president, king, or general that lead a country to greatness, but never realized some could be the ones who influence the minds of society. Although not thought of as anything, writers and poets hold the key to shaping the society’s mindset without even knowing it. Being a civil rights activist, social activist, and role model for women makes Maya Angelou a historical figure who has made a huge impact in American society and in American history. Born poor and black, she was a childhood victim of rape, shamed into silence. She was a young single mother who had to work at strip clubs for a living.

It is all about self worth. She tells her audience what her was value of being a black woman and slave. As she described it, “…I was not to know anything.” (page 55) Because of her culture, she was not of any worth, just seen as a waste of space in this world. After being told her value, she was stuck in a place where she was unsure of it herself. She broke out of this dark mindset and pledged she knew who she was and what knew.

Adichie also voices how the roommate was shocked that she could speak English, even though English is the official language in Nigeria. Adichie goes on to explain her roommate 's thoughts by stating, “My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals” (Adichie 86-87).

Throughout the article, Tan uses a number of personal examples to show and support her point. These examples span from phone conversations and hospital visits to standardized tests. By using examples that cover a wide variety of topics, Tan is able to demonstrate the large effect that her mother’s style of english had and how it was woven into her whole life and not just a part of it. Particularly in the hospital example, Tan also brings in the stereotyping of people who speak “broken” english as not being very smart. In bringing this issue that is at the very root of our society, she darkens the tone to melancholy.

In The Posionwood Bible, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver, Rachel’s arrogant attitude and perception of the Congo can be seen as ignorance which can be compared to the human condition. Instead of learning the culture she was thrown into, she chose to settle with ignorance as humans are conditioned to do today. If you take an open-minded look at society you will see that the majority of people know that there are underlying issues yet they choose to dismiss it similar to Rachel Price. Knowing that Rachel is the oldest of the four daughters, I went into this book having this notion that she would be the most aware nevertheless she is completely unaware and filled with nothing but ignorance and certainly indifference certain parts of the novel.

During the book and the movie, whites were trying to get rid blacks like they were nothing. As Atticus states “Mayella has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. In other words, Mayella is trying to get rid of Tom so it doesn’t make her remember her guilt. Atticus explains that anyone who has a relation with a black in the society is segregated like a black, and because Mayella is already poor, she cannot afford to be more lowered in the society. So she’s trying to get rid of Tom.

2. Comparison in Terms of Purpose 2.1. Achebe: To Denounce Heart of Darkness Chinua Achebe redefined our way of reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Indeed, while focusing on the description of Africa and its people, the Nigerian writer laid serious charges against the book for its racist stereotypes and highlighted the colonizer’s oppression of the natives. In truth, thirty-four years after his first delivered public lecture “An image of Africa”, excoriating the book, he spoke against it again in an interview with Robert Siegel, an American journalist in NPR radio, where he argued that the novella is only the product of “a seductive writer and who could pull his reader into the fray”.

Professor James T. Downs gave an interesting lecture on the masking of epidemics after the civil war. His take on the Harriet Ann Jacobs’ story was something that extremely captivated me because I had not known much about her story. Harriet Ann Jacobs exposed the reality of what it meant to be a slave and gave a different perspective from that of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Despite all, she did to expose the conditions that former slaves lived in, and the progress that she helped create in the 19th century, many whites did not believe that Jacobs wrote her own story. This was due to the basis that she was poor and black.