National Book Critics Circle Award Essays

//Need to finish Intro. Ernest Gaines, a Twentieth Century novelist and short story writer, uses the influences of stories, values, and customs from his childhood in Pointe Coupee Parish community to write stories using “old-fashioned” modernism. Ernest Gaines was born in the bayous of Pointe Coupee Parish near Oscar, Louisiana on January 15, 1933. His parents, Manuel and Adrienne J. Gaines, sharecropped at a local plantation, so Gaines and his twelve younger siblings were raised by his aunt, Augusteen

In this essay I will be talking about the author Junot Diaz and the social, political and histrocial context in which he wrote his stories. I will also be discussing about issues that were important to Diaz and what are his social and political convitions and how these convictions demonstrated his work such as Junot Díaz to speak on 'Immigration and Storytelling in the Age of Trump ' April 22, Author Junot Diaz stripped of honor after speaking out against the Dominican Republic and Junot Díaz

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1953. Tony, his sister, and his twin brother, who died in high school on a drug overdose, also grew up on several army bases in Hawaii, Alabama, Ethiopia, and Texas. The different places and lifestyles he observed gave him a cultural perspective that reflects in his poetry. He found poetry as a young and troubled adolescent because it was deeply mysterious and puzzling, which he found pleasing because, to him, it seemed like trying to solve

Writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, in her excerpt “No Name Woman”, from her book The Woman Warrior, narrates a part of her history from the story of her family. Within her excerpt from paragraph 21 to paragraph 27, Kingston recounts a story of her aunt committing suicide after giving birth to an illegitimate child. Her purpose is to share and inform about her Chinese culture through her family’s past. She expresses an ambivalent tone while retelling her aunt’s story in order to appeal to contradictory

Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white/Anglo-Saxon standards of beauty on black women and creation of cultural perversion. It presents a critique of the dominant aesthetic that is internalized by majority of the black community, and attempts to deconstruct the meta-ethnicity, which exercises a hegemonic control over the lives of blacks in America. The political connotations of ethnicity are derived from the desire of minority ethnic groups

Lit Analysis II In The Woman Warrior, Kingston compares Chinese women's voice with American women's voice as a symbolic reference of her constant struggle to find her identity in order to give deeper insight of her continuous conflict due to her battle of pleasing her mother's strict cultural belief and fitting in with America. Kingston is raised in America with parents who are only aware of Chinese lifestyle and not quick to adapt to the American lifestyle. Her mother tells her stories about women

Fitting Into American Culture In the excerpt from The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston reveals the importance of fitting in by retelling the hardships of a 1st generation immigrant in the American school system. Embarrassed by her accent and broken English, Kingston refused to talk in Kindergarten, a problem many 1st generation immigrants have faced. Kingston’s self-esteem was completely based on how her voice sounded, claiming that, “lt spoils my day with self-disgust when I hear my broken voice

3.2. Criticism on Kingston’s The Woman Warrior Despite the fact that Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was a notable success, many scholars in various academic fields and fellow Chinese American writers heavily criticized her autobiography; its reason is that The Woman Warrior became one of the first canonized works among Chinese American literature (Lowe 76). The heated debates on the categorization of the genre were already presented in the second chapter of this paper. This subchapter however discusses

I have a strong sense of morality, and the past few novels i have read emphasized the value of morality through God, carelessness, money and revenge Son an into to The Road (not sure what this means?) In Cormac McCarthy’s chilling post-apocalyptic book the value of morality is portrayed through God. The ideas of morality are in the words of the Boy. The Boy has grown up in a world where civilization has disappeared, where the trees and animals are long gone and the world is getting colder. Where

and daughters. Tan structures the book into four sections, like a mahjong game, and the story unfolds as the ladies share their stories in vignettes. The author does an outstanding job of discussing and illustrating the cultural diaspora and conflicts in this outstanding novel. • The four Chinese mothers who immigrate to America are in search of a better life. They are in search of a better life, not only for themselves, but for their children as well. The book is centered on San Francisco in the

Many scholars have already analyzed and scrutinized over Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, but there is always something new to learn. In a quote by Michael Ovitz, he says, “ The generality of situations that humans face in 'getting along with each other and the world'”. He talking about the human condition. William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, almost the turn of the century. He was born in New Albany Mississippi, and where he grew up influenced much of his work. Later in his life, he won

This paper focuses on the authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles, and discusses the differences and implications on children’s later adjustment. In the later section of the paper, it will be explained if the implications can be generalised to Singaporean families. I first interviewed a mother who described a situation when she discovered that her daughter, who was then nine years old, had stolen money from her. She was enraged and scolded her daughter for doing so, and proceeded to ask

What do you know about Alzheimer's? Alzheimer's is a progressive disease that attacks the brain and affects all aspects of a person's life, it is fatal and made up mostly of memory loss and confusion symptoms, which increase as time goes by. My research on dementia has helped me broaden my understanding of the short story "Babysitting Helen". It taught me that Helen's symptoms, memory loss and confusion , trouble performing day-to-day tasks, and repeating of actions and words are normal for people

2.Narrative Structure The narrative structure is about the content of the story and the way it is being told. It consists of the story plot, cast, setting (location) and genre. (Chatman, 1978) Memento a noir psychological thriller film based on a short story "Memento Mori" written by Jonathan Nolan. Memento is a Latin word which means an object kept as a reminder of a person or event. The plot is the protagonist's physical journey whereas the story is the protagonist's emotional journey. (Alcorn

Asian American Cathy Song drew closer to her Korean-Chinese ancestry, and was able to describe in a clear image of the two women she represent, one being the industrial American women and the other one being the Chinese caretaker. Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawaii making her an American by birth right. This fact did not keep her from engulfing her Korean-Chinese heritage. In the poem “Lost Sister”, Song isolates a young girl who struggles to find who she truly is in China, because of all the

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s nonfictional novel, The Woman Warrior, Kingston tells five different stories separated in chapters. Kingston wanted to express to her readers what it was like living a life as a Chinese-American. Not only did she have difficulties along the way but she also had to manage fitting in. She is constantly being put on the spot due to her parent’s Chinese traditions and her American lifestyle. The structure of The Woman Warrior focuses on both Chinese myths and her experiences

The Woman Warrior, Book by Maxime Hong Kingston This paper will discuss the narrative strategies in The Woman Warrior by Maxime Hong Kingston. Particular emphasis will be placed on the controversy of the genre, the informative aspect of the content and the narrative intent of the text. The Woman Warrior has generated much controversy since it was first published in 1976 (Wong 249). Much of this controversy is about its generic status. The book was meant to be an autobiography instead of a work of

“barren, silent, godless”(4) and bleak setting to reiterate the contrast of the atmosphere in the novel to the reader’s surroundings. The novel contains immoral people who are willing to do anything for humanity's survival where people that read the book will not share the same values. The man and the boy face many obstacles on the desolate, never-ending road that they overcome. The boy and the man have an encounter with a corrupt man that ends poorly, the man and the boy search for food by rummaging

III. Structure Structure in Beat Poetry Beat poetry often took on a free verse structure and rarely followed the norm of stanzas and couplets that much of western poetry did. Ginsberg often wrote in a manner that seemed to mimic a conversation or the fashion in which someone speaks. It is awkward at moments and has many run-on sentences but this way of writing helped portray the very personal style of Beat work. The free verse structure allows for more control for the poet to explore ideas and

Remembering and forgetting are one of Alain Resnais themes along with troubled past and present, time, and personal and historical memory. Akira Kurosawa experiences disaster early at a young age. That catastrophe (the Great Kanto Earthquake) is horrible but, at the same time, important in his life, since recalling the emotions, experiences and memories of the calamity make Kurosawa’s works authentic. In Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour remembering can be seen on two levels: (1) the represented memories