ipl-logo

How Does Toni Morrison Use Strong Language

791 Words4 Pages

It is important for authors to recount past traumas in their work because to keep history from repeating itself, one must speak of it. Based on the texts we've read like Beloved, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture and on, to get a strong response from a reader the author must use strong language or gruesome recounts of the past so that they can trigger their reader into visualizing as much as they can of a life under slavery. This can be a catalyst to thinking more consciously of what one says or does, in turn furthering society little by little from different types of oppression making it progress into the world it describes itself as. In Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Lecture, she creates a story about a blind …show more content…

[…] It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language–all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge of encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.” Here, she describes how language used violently has many dangers. These dangers can include unethical actions which further the point of language being a tool of power. In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the life and hardships slaves faced is vividly described through Sethe's and Paul D 's recounts of the past. For example, ‘“Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Hungry, nigger?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Here you go.’ Occasionally, a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus.’” Here, Paul D. remembers the sexual humiliation a slave had to face by the white man, this case being of a slave being forced to give his master fellatio with his life on the line because he was hungry. The white master used his verbal power to take advantage of his slave. Also, by describing the slave “taking a bit of foreskin to Jesus”, the reader may start

Show More
Related

Rhetorical Techniques Of Mary Ann Shadd Cary

416 Words | 2 Pages

This metaphorical language contributes to the author’s argument that slavery is immoral and should be rid of because it emphasizes freedom of speech as an “organ.” This “organ” is necessary for survival since it will allow blacks to speak their mind and others to hear their complaints.

Read More

Rhetorical Analysis On Voices Silenced

2024 Words | 9 Pages

We are living in a world where the erasure and dehumanization of people of color is slowly becoming a normative. Voices silenced, struggles trivialized, deaths becoming statistics, brutality only brought up for shock factor, achievements hidden and it is all slowly becoming accepted. Through various rhetorical strategies Claudia Rankine illustrates the experience of being part of the marginalized identity in the United States and depicts how subtly and multifaceted the methods of oppression take place in the daily life are and the negative repercussions it holds on the individual. The ambiguity of her writing with the lack of punctuation and clarification of what is thought and what is aloud allows the readers to input their own interpretation of these various scenarios.

Read More

Frederick Douglass An American Slave Rhetorical Analysis Essay

732 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout the narrative, the author includes his personal stories about experiencing the violence of slavery first-hand. For example, on page 20, he writes about the first time he witnessed a slave, his own aunt, getting the whip. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest…I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition… It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery…” The author including his experience of his aunts whipping, in detail, appeals to the emotions of the reader.

Read More

Harriet Ann Jacobs Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

923 Words | 4 Pages

She also wants to make her audience think about the moral ramifications of such pervasive human misery. Jacobs urges her readers to identify freedom as a fundamental and inviolable human right that should be provided to everyone to destroy the complacency and indifference that supported the institution of slavery through the strong storytelling she employs. In this way, the book’s desire for liberation is a sad reminder of the ongoing fight for liberty and the unwavering pursuit of justice. It encourages readers to consider the

Read More

Biblical Allusions In Toni Morrison's Beloved

1576 Words | 7 Pages

The South was disallowed from seceding, which angered them a great amount. Taking their anger out on their former slaves, they continued to treat them horrifically. The black community felt defeated. Sometimes driven by racism to turning on each other, tensions existed between African-Americans as well. With a goal of explaining these tensions and educating readers on the difficult issues that slavery created, Toni Morrison wrote Beloved.

Read More

Rhetorical Devices In The Underground Railroad

1490 Words | 6 Pages

In particular, Whitehead’s use of imagery, character interactions and figurative language brings to attention aspects of race relations that were and are still often misunderstood or disregarded by society. It is important to note, however, that the oppressed do not remain oppressed forever as demonstrated by heroine Cora ’s persisting efforts to break free. Thus, through his uncensored narrative of slavery, Whitehead sets precedence for the impassioned social resistance movements in the modern era by arguing that the most enduring road is

Read More

Narrative Of The Life Of A Slave Girl Rhetorical Analysis

552 Words | 3 Pages

For many African Americans in the 1800s, slavery was the darkest and most depressing period in their lives. Former slaves endured brutal beatings and mental agony and although it was abolished over a century ago, slavery left its victims in an abyss of distress. Regardless of its sensitivity, some survivors have been able to retell the traumatic events they underwent as a slave through writing. The authors of these autobiographies and narratives utilize pathos to elicit understanding and sympathy from readers as they vividly describe an appalling yet true era in American history.

Read More

Toni Morrison Rhetorical Analysis

276 Words | 2 Pages

Utkarsh Sharma Ms. Harris English 3.1 21 September 2015 Rhetorical Analysis The Democratic Party candidate election of 2008 was a historically significant event for the people of the United States of America. For the first time in the country’s history, an African-American, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, and a woman, New York Senator Hilary Clinton would compete against one another to earn the Democratic presidential ticket. In order to show her support for Barack Obama, Toni Morrison, the only African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, in her letter, demonstrates her approval for the Democratic candidate for president.

Read More

Non-Standard English Syntax In Toni Morrison

163 Words | 1 Pages

Toni Morrison uses non-standard English syntax. This certain Syntax refers to the order of words and phrases used to make sentences, which could be known as dialogue.. Many of the characters use non-standard or disordered syntax, and much of the narration in the novel is told with non-standard syntax. In this passage, Sethe 's house is described as empty in a very interesting, fractured way. The syntax in the book is disordered in part to replicate dialogue and the way people in the book, brought up mostly as slaves, would speak.

Read More

Violence In Solomon Northup's Twelve Years A Slave

729 Words | 3 Pages

Not only their but also the stories of all the other slaves that were not able to tell their story themselves, about the suffering that the faced day in and day out at the hands of their oppressors. It also said to the nation that they should be ashamed of how they were treating these people, demanded that they do something about the injustice that black people faced and to remember this as a part of history. As Frederick Douglass warned in an 1884 speech, “It is not well to forget the past. The past is…the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we make them more symmetrical. ”(Blight, pg. 9).

Read More

The Importance Of Names In Toni Morrison's Beloved

1233 Words | 5 Pages

Names have always held power in literature; whether it is the defeated giant Polyphemus cursing Odysseus due to him pridefully announcing his name or how the true name of the Hebrew god was considered so potent that the word was forbidden. In fact, names were given power in tales dating all the way back to the 24th century B.C.E. when the goddess Isis became as strong as the sun god Ra after tricking him into revealing his true name. And in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, names have a much stronger cultural significance; and in the case of the character known as “Beloved”, her name is essentially her whole existence. Morrison shows the true power a name holds in African American literature through the character known as “Beloved”, as her role in the story becomes defined by the name she is given and changes in the final moments of the chapter.

Read More

The Effects Of Rape And Sexual Assault In Beloved By Toni Morrison

1970 Words | 8 Pages

Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.

Read More

Insecurity In Hamlet

1800 Words | 8 Pages

Like many Shakespeare characters, Gertrude subversively breaks the molds of a woman in the Elizabethan era by having the same amount of ambition and greed as much as any other character, but the difference is she doesn’t have the luxury to outright show it. At the beginning of Hamlet, Claudius reveals that Gertrude and him have married. “Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we (as ’twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole) Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barred Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone, With this affair along. For all, our thanks.

Read More

Toni Morrison Poetic Devices

849 Words | 4 Pages

One can strive for fame or dream about it, but the most enjoyable is its gain. Little Chloe Anthony Wofford (the real name of the world-known American writer Toni Morrison), who grew up in a simple family of black workers from Ohio, hardly ever thought to become not only glorified all over the world, but also to be the one to liberate millions of African-Americans from the complex of inferiority, turning black color at a self-sufficient element of American culture and consciousness. Innovative poetic techniques of Toni Morrison combine bold literary experiment, folklore tradition and sharpness of reaction towards social and cultural upheavals in the country and in the world. The writer 's close interest in cultural, spiritual and historical

Read More

Skin Stereotypes

1544 Words | 7 Pages

Often times we see the same issues in history repeat, but manifested in different ways. Literature is able to capture the emotions and thought process of a given time, letting you inside the minds of the people dealing with such dilemmas. In the course we read various pieces of literature: Sonny’s Blues, Rectatiff, Cathedral, The Lady With the Dog, Fences and Short eyes, each having individual themes and styles, but all ultimately including the central motif of the struggles effecting the African American community. Not only is this a reoccurring topic in the literature that we read, but it a controversial and present topic in today’s media. Electing our first African-American president, electoral candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and

Read More

More about How Does Toni Morrison Use Strong Language

Related Topics

Open Document