The Meaning Of Identity In 'Theme For English B'

In Judith Butler’s essay,” Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” she attempts to clarify what is considered human and what defines a human, and how it applies to the different gender roles and human rights. The difficulty that this essay presents, however, is its ambiguity – the fact that she fails to clearly identify what a human is and sort of challenges the readers to look within themselves to search for their own interpretation of what they believe gives them their own moral rights and human integrity. Human integrity is a word that can easily be defined when searched for in any dictionary database. “LawCookies.com” defines it as, “the human right to live without being physically harmed or harassed by others. No one can touch,

And if “Had anyone been there with her, she’d have been still and faint and hot with chagrin, (Mairs 259).” Instead of pitying herself, Mairs is able joke about her hardships in her day-to-day life despite having physical incapabilities. She then continues with a steady, yet uplifting tone as she explains the reasoning behind why she labels herself as a “cripple”, stating that it is a “clean word, straightforward, and precise, (Mairs 260).” She believes that words like “disabled” or “handicapped” are words that are “moving [her] away from her condition, to be widening the gap between word and reality, (Mairs 260).” By using these euphemisms for her condition, people tend to view her as something she isn 't.

“I am the only colored student in my class” (Hughes, 10). This shows racial diversity in Hughes’s poem. While Cullen’s poem isn’t about race in general. In Cullen’s poem, he talks about grief and sorrow, this is another difference between the two poems.

In the poem “Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes reveals that the first assignment results in truth, where writing what he feels will be true regardless of what it is. With the progress of the poem he makes small gestures to symbolize his identity such as his age and race. Opening up the theme of personal identity, in turn trying to figure out who he is personally.

Although the hierarchy that belongs to this story’s main character, Joy-Hulga, isn’t as polarized towards independence, it is very similar to Calhoun’s hierarchy because of her belief that so called ‘good country people’ don’t have the capacity for intellectual thought, just like Calhoun felt about the Partridge citizens. However, while Calhoun’s hierarchy and sense of superiority draw from his appreciation of independence and nonconformity, Joy-Hulga’s hierarchy resides in the artificial, and thereby, her wooden leg to an extent. Joy-Hulga prides herself in her intellect, which is validated by her “Ph.D. in philosophy” (276), but she also uses the connotation of superiority with a Ph.D. to justify her aversion to those she deems inferior, as shown by how it’s stated that “she looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity” (276). Her sense of superiority, and thereby her hierarchy that supplies her superiority, is captured within her belief that “she [could Manley Pointer’s] remorse in hand and [change] it into a deeper understanding of life” (284). Her predilection to viewing people like Manley Pointer as inferior translates into a self-isolation prior to Manley Pointer’s intrusion into her life.

In all of society’s drama and solitude which is shown throughout this novel brings out the sympathetic side in all of us. Hester’s being an outcast is inflicted on her rather than her willfully seeking it out. Throughout the rest of her life, she is constantly seeking after relationships with other human beings on a base of honesty. She is isolated and an outcast but is still able to function as a human being and is not alienated from humanity. The blame for this tragic predicament in which she finds herself in lies squarely on the shoulders of the Puritan judges of her destiny.

When it comes to analyzing poems, or comparing and contrasting, there are many different elements to consider. No two poems are the same. Although Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”, Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!” and the legendary William Shakespeare’s “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds” differ in many ways, they contain several similarities, including theme, language, rhyme scheme, meter, and stanza forms. The first similarity that these poems contain is the theme.

People with disabilities are often viewed as less capable, less intelligent and not available to cope well in society. Mairs uses the different persuasive strategies such as ethos, logos and pathos to create a conscious awareness to build a world in which despite the differences everyone is treated with equality and dignity. She imagines her body as something other than problematic, but a reason to fight to build a world in which people wants her in. Mairs mentions in page 169 “I imagine a world where people, allowed the space to accept- admit, endure, embrace- their diverse and often difficult realities.” As Robert M Hensel, a famous Guinness world champion and a man with spina bifida said once “There is no greater disability in society, than the inability to see a person as

Throughout this essay, Steinem uses various rhetorical claims in order to establish credibility. For instance, from the beginning the utilization of pathos was applied in order to catch the attention of the readers. Steimen expresses, “I

They touch on the fact that, “In a post-feminist popular culture, where the imperfect, flawed body is pervasively and persistently on view as a reminder of the requirement to work towards a largely unattainable perfectibility” (354). Every is focusing on bettering herself. On the other hand, the woman in The Dawning is focused on another task. She isn’t shameful of her nudity or of her imperfect body. The Dawning suggests that although the woman is struggling with being an outcast she still holds power.

She is able to decry the injustice of women being punished while the men are not held responsible for the consequences. In the end, both women were only able to regain their respectability through the actions of

No one enjoys being called out for a wrongdoing or urged to confess a mistake. However, that is exactly what Audre Lorde does in her paper “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” She discusses the role of the oppressors and the oppressed while both reprimanding and sympathizing with her readers. At a first glance, Lorde’s paper may seem like it attempts to tackle too much, from race and gender to socioeconomic class and sexuality, all at the cost of potentially ostracizes those in positions of power. Because of that, Lorde must work to not divide her readers between the privileged and those less fortunate while also answering the question of whether or not society can combat prejudice programming without falling into the paralyzing

Is this something that a student should be taking away at the end of the day? Absolutely not. The white American’s history is projected unto the students as the dominant history that shaped their culture. They seem to undermine the history and significance of the African American. Many teachers also generalize and treat African Americans as one group, yet they differentiate ethnicities of white Americans with no problem.

The poem “I, Too, Sing America” by Langston Hughes is an argument for racial equality that describes the struggle of an African American individual being included in American patriotism. In the poem, the speaker describes that he is sent to eat in the kitchen when guests arrive; he eats well, though, so that tomorrow he may join the others at the table. In the last few lines Hughes describes that “they” in the poem will eventually see the speaker’s beauty and feel embarrassed, because he, “too, is America.” My initial problem in analyzing the poem was that I assumed that the images in the work had to represent something else metaphorically, specifically when considering the second and third stanzas of the poem, which contain a juxtaposition

Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King grew up in somewhat similar environments. Both, as african american men, had to deal with the everyday and very evident racism of an unequal society. Langston Hughes was raised by his Grandmother until her death. He went to live with his mother, “and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio,” (Biography.com Editors 2). Here, he went through the self-discovery period of teenage years, at Central High School, a predominantly white high school.