Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary Of A Teenage Girl

In the story “Girl” we see the author talking about the things that a young girl should do and learn so that she can be accepted by society. She starts by saying the in beginning that washing cloths is only a task for women, starting on Monday “Wash the white cloths on Monday”. Then goes on to talk about doing more chores on Tuesday that should only be done by a woman. I believe that the gender of this story is of a mother talking and teaching to her young daughter. With some of the wording I can assume that this is surely an African American or Caribbean mother. Kincaid is trying to show us how differently young boys are treated than the same aged girls and how they are looked at differently for doing the same activities. It is not lady-like

In Alice Munro short story “Boys and Girls” is about a young girl confused in life about herself maturing into a young women that takes place on a fox farm in Jubilee, Ontario, Canada with her parents and her younger brother. The character of the young girl that is not specified by a name in the story is struggling with the roles that are expected by her peers of a young women in the 1940’s. This young girl has been helping her father on the fox farm for many years in which brought so much of a joy in her life. As she gets older, as well and as her younger brother Laird grows older, she is starting to realize that her younger brother will be soon be taking over the roles and responsibility of taking care of the animals. Then her mother and grandmother points out the anticipations of her to start acting more like how a young women of her age should present themselves and this has great emotional effects on her, and at the end of the story she shows a final act of disobedience against her father, but it only shows the thing she resist the most, her maturing into a young women and becoming her own person.

“Girl” is a short story in which the author, Jamaica Kincaid, unofficially presents the stereotypes of girls in the mid 1900s. Kincaid includes two major characters in the story “Girl”, they are the mother and the girl. Although the daughter only asks two questions in this story, she is the major character. The mother feels like her daughter is going in the wrong direction and not making the best decisions in her life. The whole story is basically the mother telling her daughter what affects her decisions will have in the future. The mother believes that because her daughter isn’t sitting, talking, cleaning, walking or singing correctly it will lead her to a path of destruction. “Girl” is a reflection of female sexuality, the power of family, and how family can help overcome future dangers.

In the short story, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, you hear about the many words of wisdom, or advice that a mother is attempting to pass on to her daughter. The condescending tone of the story is portrayed by the use of semi colons, showing a steady stream of advice and preaching of the mother onto the daughter. The story follows an almost poetic or lyrical style of writing that flows from basic advice like how to sweep a corner to advice like how to handle a man bullying you or how to have an abortion. Although a lot of the advice given to the daughter may be useful in her life and in the culture they live in, it is delivered in a way that seems very callous, and is said with a stern tone, much like a dictator. The daughter in the story tries to speak up only twice throughout the entire thig, only to be completely unheard as the mother continues her chant. The only time the mother’s advice is repeating is when she refers to her daughter as a slut, or her inevitable “becoming of a slut”, which occurs four times throughout the work. The story is written with no real chronological timeline and does not have the traditional beginning, middle, and ending.

Teenagers. What did you think about when you read the first sentence? Was it that teens are those one track minded creatures that no one can really understand although they were in fact once a teen themselves. Perhaps you were thinking what causes them to act the way they do? Well, in the essay “The Terrible Teens” by Elizabeth Kolbert, Kolbert gives her insight on teenagers and what causes them to act a certain way with the insert of theories from Frances Jensen and Laurence Steinberg. Kolbert goes on to support the theories that a teenager’s brain isn’t fully developed, why teenagers take more risks due to the temptations and peer pressure. In addition, why violence becomes an issue for teens starting when they’re young.

The famous leader Martin Luther King once said, “Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.” This quote pretty much summed up the way in which African Americans felt during the 1960’s. They had basically no meaning to life. They were irrelevant. Whites wanted no part in them. This was especially the case in the state of Mississippi. Anne Moody, writer of the autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi explains the importance of the civil rights movement in the state of Mississippi and the influence it had on her life and her viewpoint.

The protagonist of the story “Connie” is a 15-year old girl whose life was only about movies, music, shopping malls, and the “drive-in restaurant where the older kids hung out”. She was eager to become her own person and develop a unique identity. She wanted to be nothing like the women in her family; her mother, once pretty herself, now "scuffles around the house in

The story of “ St. Lucy’s Home for Girls” by Karen Russell introduced a girl named Claudette and followed her through her life during school. The author wrote about her learning how to be civilized. She talks about Claudette’s transformation from her old culture to her new culture. The transformation is put into five stages. The stages represent emotions that Claudette and the other girls would feel during these courses.

The article Are you raising an Internet bully? Here’s how to end that behavior by Monica Leftwich written in The Washington Post, is a discussion on how parental behavior can affect kid’s social behavior and attitude towards others.

Throughout the course of time, roles in our society towards gender has evolved. In the story Boys and Girls by Alice Munro relatively has a direct message which is the constant battle of gender stereotypes. The audience is reading through the point of view of the main character, which is a girl, and her frustration she feels. Through the young girl’s experience, Alice Munro is able to show the readers the role of stereotypes or expectations that a female has to fulfill.

In The Book of Stories Beginnings by Kristin Kladstrup, Lucy Martin found her great-uncle's The Book of Stories Beginning and began writing her own story beginnings in the enchanted journal. She wrote about her father being a great magician. Everything written in the journal came to life. Lucy's father turned himself into a raven using his magic potion and flew across the ocean to a mythical land called Cat'n'berd Island. Lucy Martin and her great-uncle, Oscar Martin, went on a search to find Lucy's lost father and save him from King Bertram. Kristina Kladstrup was born Sioux City, Iowa. When she was a child, she loved reading and writing and she decided that becoming a writer would be her vocation. The house that her mother lived in when she was a child inspired the setting of Kladstrup’s novel. Kladstrup had also written two other children books which are Garden Princess and Le Livre Des Débuts D'histoires. She had co-written two children's books. One is A Night In Santa's Great Big Bag with Tim Jessell and the other is The Gingerbread Pirates with Matt Tavares. I chose The Book of Story Beginnings because a friend recommended it to me. She said it was set in an island far away from Iowa. I enjoy reading about adventures to distant magical lands, so I agreed to read this book. Upon finishing to book, the ending of the book was different from what I had predicted. I thought that after Oscar helped Lucy find her father, Oscar

The age gap between generations can alter the perspectives in which one understands certain situations. In Alice Monro’s short fictional story Friend of My Youth the female characters have an important role in displaying the central theme of the story. It also presents different perspectives on life and its outcomes. The point of view displayed in the story is first person, specifically the daughter’s perspective. This tactic chosen by Monro gives a unique standpoint within the story, and portrays the conflict of interest between the narrator and the mother. It also converts to third person to create character development midway through the story; there is another conflict

Elders in a family often tell youngsters stories of their past. Moreover, Steven Zeitlin, Amy Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker, assert in “Family Stories” that “Family stories are usually based on real incidents which become embellished over the years” (10). These stories tend to change as people age and experience various situations. Canfield’s short story “Sex Education” depicts Aunt Minnie, a woman who faced a traumatic sexual experience as a teenager, telling her story to an audience of younger generations at three different stages of her life; each account is told in a different manner as she experiences various situations that involve sexuality, namely

Minnie is an aspiring cartoon artist, and she just recently decided to start keeping an audio diary. She suddenly awakens, and wants to start experiencing her sexuality. Minnie does not see herself as attractive. Even though, she receives positive attention from the boy’s at school. Minnie and her mother’s boyfriend go out one day because her mom is too busy with other things. Monroe takes 15 year old Minnie to a bar. She flirts with him, and tells him that she would like to lose her virginity. The pair soon begins to have secret meetings at Monroe’s house. Minnie one day soon sees her favorite cartoonist inside of a comic book store. Minnie soon mails her original creation to her favorite cartoonist. Eventually Minnie’s sexual appetite grows.

After reading The Liars Club an autobiography by Mary Karr, my interpretation of the reading is that she is telling her story from her point of view as a child and as an adult, utilizing foreshadowing and vivid imagery. For example, the reading states “My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark.” “I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor” (Karr 3). This passage also brought some significance to the story as discussed in class. This helps the reader to understand that a very young age Mary Karr experienced something that was traumatic and it as stuck with her, therefore she labeled is one of her sharpest childhood memories. Usually when things happen to us as children we are not able to remember them exactly in detail, but when they are traumatic events those memories tend to stick with us throughout life. While writing Karr takes the role of two characters, those include the character “Pokey”. In the story this is a representation of Mary Karr a child. Her father Pete calls her Pokey. During this time frame Mary isn’t too aware of what is happening to her, she admires her father, and is also of her sisters. As I continued to read the story the next character that Mary Karr takes on is the narrator or author. This is referenced throughout the story when she looks back on her childhood to try and understand what was happening to her. A good example of this is when the author uses breaking of the fourth