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Summary Of A Plague Of Tics By David Sedaris

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In “A Plague of Tics” (1997), David Sedaris exemplifies that some habits and behaviors people find queer are permanent and irrepressible by others; you cannot judge every person on the same scale of normality. Sedaris accentuates this subconscious act by interlacing his childhood “’special problems’” of “obsessive” rocking, counting, and touching (363) with experiences reaching his college discoveries of “drugs, drinking, and smoking” (370) as well as deliberately adding excerpts of his father “attempting to cure [him] with a series of threats” (365). The author vividly illustrates an extreme case of OCD, commonly associated with tics, and adult demeanors in order to show the horrific side-effects both the person and surrounding friends and
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Mass hysteria cases have been reported many times throughout history and have continued to occur even in the modern world. In “Mass Hysteria in Upstate New York” by Ruth Graham, the author states that many cases of Tourette’s-like symptoms that had occurred in LeRoy Junior-Senior High School was not as a result of the “derailment that dumped cyanide… in LeRoy in 1970” (1). Instead, Graham specifically accuses mass hysteria for the origination of the symptoms similar to those of Tourette’s. The incident at LeRoy Junior-Senior High School provided many parallels to mass hysteria. The author claims that the victims of mass hysteria “are overwhelmingly female” (2).

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Sedaris had believed his childhood was so boring in comparison to his partner Hugh’s childhood. Sedaris compares his childhood to Hugh’s childhood a lot until he started to have feelings of resentment towards him. Sedaris says, “We had a collie and a house cat… They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan… I threw stones at stop sighs… Hugh threw stones at crocodiles” (Paragraph 8).

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One of the most important aspects of “grit lit” is the violence that occurs in almost every novel. The violence that reoccurs throughout all of the “grit lit” novels allows for a more exciting plot and character conflict throughout the novel. One of the most influential and famous southern writers is Harry Crews. Crews is responsible for many different novels, short stories, and autobiographies, and almost all of his works include some type of violence. The main reason for violence in southern literature is due to the unordinary, low-life characters that the author includes to allow for a violent plot.

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Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a thrilling book full of mutiny, sadism, and murder. The proprietor of all this is Captain Andrew Jaggery of the ship Seahawk, whom many believe is a sadistic maniac with the need for rule and discipline. However, the belief has surfaced that contrary to popular thought, Jaggery is a decent man with a mental disease that causes him to have a need for order and unnatural anger towards others for reasons only attributed to the disease. While he is not terrible or has a lack of compassion (psychotic), he is not a simply ‘stellar’ person as might be denoted. He is in fact just an adequate person to the unwritten rules of how a person acts, due to his OCD.

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Many psychological disorders go unnoticed and uncared for: many people do not even know that is what they are struggling with. In one such instance, written by David Sedaris, he recollects his childhood dealing with an obsessive compulsive disorder in the narrative essay, “A Plague of Tics”. He argues that no matter what he did he could not control the actions his brain transmitted him to do. Sedaris uses emotional appeals,such as ethos and logos. He also utilizes descriptive language to support his credibility, describing personal facts and experiences.

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1.)The Black Plague has struck. It is a curse from God for all of us sinners. We must have done something awful to deserve something so horrible. The Black Plague is a sickness that kills you only a few days after you get it.

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Paula A. Treichler from the University of Illinois analyzes “The Yellow Wallpaper” and its effects of the diagnosis given to the main character effectively in her article “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”. In her article, Treichler emphasizes the reasons why the main character was lead to believe her diagnosis from her husband and the other contributing factors that played a role in her hysteria, such as lack of social interaction and confinement. In the introduction to her article, Treichler gives the background of the story and hits on every area of importance. The diagnosis made by the narrator 's husband is highlighted by Treichler in her opening paragraph to illustrate the significance and informality of the diagnosis and its unreliability.

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The Power of Love: Passion or Pride? Why do we hurt the ones we love? What causes our sweet, light hearted personalities to become black with anger and frustration? These questions are brought into focus in the short story, “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst. In this short story, a boy tries to teach his handicapped younger brother to blend in and act normal.

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Sedaris felt that if others knew what was going on with a person as strange as him, than others would learn that it is ok to do their own weird tics. It is also important to note that when “A Plague of Tics” took place he was in grade school and then later college. This would imply for this essay that he was writing towards people in a similar context. This essay would relate most to all the problems in the world going on with bullying. It isn’t a surprise that someone such as Sedaris got frowned upon by others for not conforming quite like the

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“Jesus Shaves” is a short story by the American writer David Sedaris. The story is set in a French class in France. It starts with the teacher explaining a new pronoun one. She was asking students what one does during different festivals and holidays such as Bastille Day or Easter. There are many different ethnic groups represented in the class, such as Italian, Polish, and Moroccan.

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(Forward: The Prologue Preamble Perambulate) SERVING NO ESSAYS BEFORE THEIR TIME While demonstrably neurotic to care about wines and worry over colleges, before their time - both of which, during the writing of these initial drafts, are in my far-flung future - I can’t help myself. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me I had OCD, I’d have $39.25!   However, the dispassionate diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not so singularly simple, for example, while some excitable clinicians propose I exhibit multiple symptoms of CDO, which is almost exactly like OCD, but in alphabetical order; other more melodramatic diagnosticians advocate for a verdict of Compulsive Disorder Extreme, which is indistinguishable from OCD & CDO, but sequential - just as it should be!

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Not only concerns about their personal life, the confessional poetry also side with the individual against the norms of society. Many confessional poetry contains a complex tension between a neurotic individual and the high society. It seems an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man who is neurotic and insightful. In his Creating Mental Illness, Alaan V. Horwitz argues that the current conceptions of mental illness as a disease fit only a small number of serious psychological conditions and that most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or simply forms of deviant behavior. The social background should not be avoided in analyzing confessional poetry.

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