Critical Analysis Of Meena Alexander

The author moves to her actual realization that she has been misunderstood her entire lifetime along with the Western world by extending her vocabulary and appealing to emotional diction. These are seen clearly through “’aina” meaning culture and “the great bloodiness of memory: genealogy” (Trask 118). These few examples show how her language is connecting with the audience on an emotional level by using native terms and powerful language such as “bloodiness.” She appeals to the ideals of pathos by employing meaningful words when describing the traits of her people. She

Anzaldua repeats this claim throughout the text, informing her readers about language discrimination within the people that share the same culture as she does but not the same language.

Zitkala-Sa’s autobiography informs her readers of the damaging and traumatizing effects of assimilation by utilizing her life experiences as a narrative, demonstrating how living under an oppressive and dominant culture was an internal struggle between society's expectations and her own cultural identity. Sa’s experience is especially unique considering her mixed heritage as well.

“Being only a daughter for my father meant my destiny would lead me to become someone’s wife”, like Sandra Cisneros illustrates in her essay “Only Daughter”, many women in the Mexican-American culture used to not have other choice in life, but to eventually become someone’s wife. Cisneros focuses on the lives of first and second generation Mexican American females. In her essay, she brings the reader her own life story to support the struggle that many Mexican-American women had to experience at the time the essay was written, and that can still be seen in modern society. In her essay, Cisneros effectively convinces her reader of the difficulties of growing as a female, more specifically, as an only daughter in a Mexican-American family of nine.

Anita Nair’s “Ladies Coupe” has narratives by six women characters who by chance meet in a train ladies coupe that Akhilandeswari alias Akhila boards in. all the women speak of the repressive forces of a patriarchal India. Though they are from different community or cultural, all women share pain in different means. The novel is a ‘bildungsroman’ either narrating the childhood to adulthood life or the characters liberation by developing confidence to shun the web of patriarchal metaphors.

Personal, historical and cultural context is impossible for poets, like many artist to separate from their work. It in these poems that we the responders learn from their experiences. Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Poems “Son of Mine” and “Then and Now” clearly show personal, historical and cultural context about Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s life. This essay shows how Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poems show her personal, historical and cultural context.

Throughout the history, in all cultures the roles of males and females are different. Relating to the piece of literature “Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid for the time, when women’s roles were to work in the home. By examining

In this essay I will analyse to what extent the characters in the novels The House on Mango Street (text A), by Sandra Cisneros, and Annie John (text B), by Jamaica Kincaid, reflect the role of men and women in society. These two novels criticise patriarchal societies, where “women are taught to think as men, identify with a male point of view and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values…” . In both of them, there are clear examples of chauvinism, which conditions the lives of Esperanza Cordero, a “Chicana” who lives

Her Wild American Self by Evelina Galang is a collection of short stories that reflects on not only what it means to be A Filipina-American but a woman in society. Being both of those things subsequently leads to everyday struggles that involve interpersonal conflicts, societal pressures, and familial obligations. Women often sacrifice so much of their feelings and consequently themselves when trying to deal with such a harsh reality. This reality which relies heavily on society also forces women to become subservient in many aspects of their lives and does not allow them to speak out and defend themselves in times of need. Myself, like so many of the women in Galang’s stories, have gone through feelings of shame and guilt while trying to

American Literature has always been about men and for men. In this essay, we are going to analyze the women’s role in the book, as inferior and weaker gender.

Junot Diaz, the author of “A Cheaters Guide to Love” writes his short story with many different references to anti-feminism. He writes about women in different ways to show them as powerless, and un-superior to the main character in the short story. From this short story, Diaz conveys the main characters ways when he shows the him talking about, the girl he calls to have sex with, the women at the yoga class, and the files read at the end of the story that show the fifty girls he cheated on his fiancé with. Diaz creates his main character and puts him in the second person to relate to the reader, but show his anti-feministic signs.

We live in a society where the similarities between female and males are seen at birth. It begins innocently with the toddlers; girls get pink while boys get blue. The gap between boys and girls develops with time and becomes increasingly apparent. There are still gender stereotypes today, but it is not as bad as it was in the past. Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” perfectly portrays gender stereotypes. It represents gender concepts as cultural constructs in the period it was written. These conceptions are comparable to current stereotypes about gender. The book gives us a list of commands from a mother to a daughter. Men in the society are dominant to the women, and the set of rules is a product of patriarchy whereby the mother and daughter appear as subordinates to the men in their lives. The article makes one aware of the prevailing masculine hierarchy that exists in a family, and how it creates firm gender roles for females in the society.

In the short story “Indian Camp”, by Ernest Hemingway, many controversies arise about the idea of feminism in the text. Feminism is a general term used to describe advocating women’s rights socially, politically, and making equal rights to those of men. Feminist criticism is looked through a “lens” along the line of gender roles in literature, the value of female characters within the text, and interpreting the perspective from which the text is written. Many of Hemingway’s female characters display anti-feminist attributes due to the role that women play or how they are referred to within a text by him or other characters. There are many assumptions that go along with the

All characters in the novel are living in a man’s world; nevertheless, the author has tried to change this world by the help of her characters. She shows a myriad of opportunities and different paths of life that woman can take, and more importantly she does not show a perfect world, where women get everything they want, she shows a world where woman do make mistakes, but at the same time they are the ones that pay for these mistakes and correct them.

She makes an important point when trying to go beyond the female (otherness), by paying careful attention to differences among women themselves, and by putting emphasize on the multiple realties that women faces, and by that trying to uncover universalist interpretations (Parpart and Marchand 1995:6). She reveals the inadequacy of binary categories by showing us how power is defined in binary terms, between the people who have (men) and the people who do not (women). This is a consequence of seeing women as a homogenous group, and contributes to the reinforcement of the binary division between men and women (Mohanty 1991:64). By assuming that women are a already constituted group with the same experiences and interests, gender is looked upon as something that can be applied cross cultures (Mohanty 1991:54), and it also produces an assumption about the “average third world woman” as poor and uneducated, in contrast to the educated, modern Western women (Mohanty 1991:56). Implicit in the binary analytic lies the assumption that the third world woman only can be liberated through western rationality. Mohanty is making an important point when emphasising the need to challenge these objectifications (Udayagiri 1995:163).