Margaret Atwood and Anwar Sadat Speeches Essay

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

In “The Keynote Address of Seneca Falls”, Elizabeth Stanton uses the rhetorical devices, repetition, imagery, and tone to portray her feelings about women’s rights and to speak up for all women who believe that woman are just as great as man. Seneca Falls in New York was where one of the first women’s right’s convention was held, which over three hundred people, men and woman, attended. This convention is where Elizabeth gave her speech to hundreds of people who wanted to reach the same goals.

The world is cruel and harsh; what does it take to prove that you and your experiences are capable of persuasion. In this world, you’d want as many allies as possible, and building emotional bridges with others is a definite way of proving that you matter to others. It’s a matter of philosophy; human nature emphasizes on individual existence; therefore rhetoric is effective to measure one’s importance. Elie Wiesel, a man of age, is a jewish holocaust survivor who has a story to tell and a story to be heard. Does the man have what it takes to prove himself worthy of a rhetoric leader? Elie Wiesel’s speech, The Perils of Indifference, Mr. Wiesel takes advantage of rhetorical questions and the appeals of pathos and logos to persuade and inform the audience about their inner indifference towards the havoc happening around the world.

“Oh, fairytales, where desperate, naïve girls sacrifice everything for their so-called prince charming”. The realities of these childhood classics are controversial, sexist, and dark, yet, it’s also adored by millions of young girls around the world. Cinderella, an often sugar-coated story, is a great example on how sexism and gender stereotypes prevail in literature. The Grimm Brothers touch on a variety of devices, from characterization to symbolism, all revealing the inequality in not only fictional literature but our real-life society as well. A feminist literary critic will interpret these controversial themes and apply their beliefs of equal rights into the study of the Grimm Brother’s Cinderella.

In 1999, Wiesel delivers an informative speech at the White House. In the beginning of Wiesel’s speech he mentions his gratitude to the American people, as well as the president’s wife for their actions, and concerns for (humanity) people in distress. Meanwhile, the speaker elaborates on the history of bloodshed and indifference, and its effect over the years in society. During this point of the outline, a chronological pattern is revealed. As the speaker describes indifference, he increases the audience understanding of a familiar topic. Nevertheless, depending on the audience, or era, the information within the message may be new to some people. The speaker explains the advantages and disadvantages of indifference; “my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of

On the 12th of April, in the year 1999, Elie Wiesel gave a speech at the White House. Several members of congress, President Clinton, and the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, were present to listen to him. His speech became a powerful testament to the pitfalls and dangers of being indifferent to the sufferings of others. However, Wiesel’s speech was also a very skillful exercise in using rhetoric for persuasion. By using certain wording and striking the right balance of facts and emotions, he was moving the audience in the direction of understanding his point of view. He was moving the audience to not feel sympathy, but actual empathy to the events he was speaking about. To feel the as closely as he felt for these events in history. He acted as judge, jury, disappointed parent and as vengeful deity. In this paper, I will examine key elements of his speech to show that by instilling deep feelings of shame, fear, and even pride at the right moments can inspire people to open their minds to the dangers of ignoring the pleads of help from their fellow man.

Atwood uses the rhetoric device of dirimens copulatio in the extract “what are novels anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definite answer to that”, this hints at self-deprecation and creates a sense of humility and textual integrity as she accept s this flaw in her argument so to appear unbiased. Atwood argues that the depiction of women in literature ironically prevents women’s advancement, similarly Aung San Suu Kyo argues that the depiction of women in their traditional roles of carers and nurturers has prevented their advancement in politics. Atwood employs polyvocality to shift from complex arguments to the seemingly simplistic anecdote of the eternal breakfast. Her literary knowledge and wit allows her to embody her message and complex ideas to convey that she as a woman is complex. The speeches timelessness and treatment of universal concerns through the construction of rhetoric support her argument and captivate the attention of past and present audiences.

On April 12, 1999, Elie Wiesel, a prominent figure and Holocaust survivor, voiced his empowered speech “The Perils of Indifference” in the East Room of the White House which was hosted by President Bill Clinton and wife, Hillary Clinton. The speech was a direct call-to-action reaching out to society for a change. This change that he desperately pleaded for warranted a need of our society to help aid assistance to those they have ignored in the past. Throughout the course of Wiesel’s speech, he managed to employ Aristotle’s means of persuasion with an ease capable of jarring his audience to want to stop such indifferences from ensuing, so that future generations could have renewed sense of hope and promise. Pathos reigned heavily in his speech through his many, notable experiences and rhetorical questions. The majority of Wiesel’s speech focused on appeals to pathos, logos, and ethos which were used to attract the audiences’ attention as well as to develop their understanding of the problem. Through these measures, Wiesel’s main goal was to persuade them to take action against indifference which he successfully achieved. Wiesel was able to use his painful memories of the torture from the Holocaust to express what he noted as “perils of indifference” and ultimately how it can lead future generations to learn from history’s mistakes.

Reading literature, at first, might seem like simple stories. However, in works like William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” Katherine Mansfield's “Miss Brill,” and Kate Chopin's “The Storm,” the female protagonists are examples of how society has oppressive expectations of women simply because of their gender.

Both Hughes and Atwood present an extreme representation of their contextual concerns and issues of their respective times and worlds. Ted Hughes’ poems, “Your Paris and “The Shot” published in the “Birthday Letters” collection in 1998 explore issues regarding conflicting perspectives and control, Hughes wanted to illustrate Plath’s mental state to prove his innocence, as he was blamed for Plath’s suicide. Similarly in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 “The Handmaid’s Tale”, there is an exaggerated exploration of a patriarchal society and the conflicting perspectives of both sides, written to reflect the 1960s being a period growth in religious right power which threatened to reverse women’s rights advancements. In comparison both these texts go in depth to examine two of the major themes of the modern world, hence influencing

Throughout many pays and novels, women have had important roles of helping form the main characters, in the way they think, move or change the story. Women have always been subordinate to men all through history, but in plays, novels, short stories, etc, they have been given large enforcing roles, showing the power within women. William Shakespeare and Sophocles use guilt, pride, and influence to demonstrate the importance of the women’s role to support the main characters in both the plays of Macbeth and Antigone.

Reflecting upon their role in society, women in literature are often portrayed in a position

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.

(1) ‘I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in….Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended.’ (chapter 9, p. 62)

When someone mentions the name “Cinderella”, the first thing that usually comes to our minds is the fairytale in which the fair maiden who works so hard yet it treated so poorly gains her “fairytale ending” with a wave of a magic wand. However, the fairytale of Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers has multiple differences in plot from the fairytale we all usually think of. The plot of the Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers, written in 1812, is that a young female’s mother passes away early in the story, departing with the message to Cinderella to remain “pious and good”. Cinderella remained true to this message given to her by her mother, and she showed this in her work ethic. Because Cinderella had remained pious and good, her mother, in return, watched over her in the form of the birds above her grave that gave Cinderella help and material things that she needed. In the end, Cinderella has her “happily ever after”, for when the prince held a festival to find a new bride, she was chosen due to her insurmountable beauty. The feminist lens critiques how females are commonly represented in texts, and how insufficient these representations are as a categorizing device. These representations of women often include them being passive and emotional—staying back while the men do the work. Cinderella relates to the feminist lens because she fits into the typical representations of women created by men. Feminist criticism is important to recognize because women are often falsely represented as helpless, thus needing a man to come to their rescue. It is common in literature to see helpless women, crying and begging for help instead of being able to work out their own problems and hardships. Others, however, may believe that it is still important to uphold the fundamentals of the feminist lens because it keeps the man in power, which they say is important in keeping the man the head of the household. Cinderella thoroughly represents the feminist lens because it shows how women in literature uphold the representations of passive and emotional, created by the man.