National Book Critics Circle Award Essays

  • Ernest Gaines A Lesson Before Dying

    987 Words  | 4 Pages

    //Need to finish Intro. Ernest Gaines, a Twentieth Century novelist and short story writer, uses the influences of stories, values, and customs from his childhood in Pointe Coupee Parish community to write stories using “old-fashioned” modernism. Ernest Gaines was born in the bayous of Pointe Coupee Parish near Oscar, Louisiana on January 15, 1933. His parents, Manuel and Adrienne J. Gaines, sharecropped at a local plantation, so Gaines and his twelve younger siblings were raised by his aunt, Augusteen

  • Junot Diaz Analysis

    1291 Words  | 6 Pages

    In this essay I will be talking about the author Junot Diaz and the social, political and histrocial context in which he wrote his stories. I will also be discussing about issues that were important to Diaz and what are his social and political convitions and how these convictions demonstrated his work such as Junot Díaz to speak on 'Immigration and Storytelling in the Age of Trump ' April 22, Author Junot Diaz stripped of honor after speaking out against the Dominican Republic and Junot Díaz

  • Tony Hoagland's Special Problems In Vocabulary

    710 Words  | 3 Pages

    Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1953. Tony, his sister, and his twin brother, who died in high school on a drug overdose, also grew up on several army bases in Hawaii, Alabama, Ethiopia, and Texas. The different places and lifestyles he observed gave him a cultural perspective that reflects in his poetry. He found poetry as a young and troubled adolescent because it was deeply mysterious and puzzling, which he found pleasing because, to him, it seemed like trying to solve

  • Cultural Feminism In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    856 Words  | 4 Pages

    Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white/Anglo-Saxon standards of beauty on black women and creation of cultural perversion. It presents a critique of the dominant aesthetic that is internalized by majority of the black community, and attempts to deconstruct the meta-ethnicity, which exercises a hegemonic control over the lives of blacks in America. The political connotations of ethnicity are derived from the desire of minority ethnic groups

  • Character Analysis: The Woman Warrior

    283 Words  | 2 Pages

    Fitting Into American Culture In the excerpt from The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston reveals the importance of fitting in by retelling the hardships of a 1st generation immigrant in the American school system. Embarrassed by her accent and broken English, Kingston refused to talk in Kindergarten, a problem many 1st generation immigrants have faced. Kingston’s self-esteem was completely based on how her voice sounded, claiming that, “lt spoils my day with self-disgust when I hear my broken voice

  • The Woman Warrior Thesis

    486 Words  | 2 Pages

    Lit Analysis II In The Woman Warrior, Kingston compares Chinese women's voice with American women's voice as a symbolic reference of her constant struggle to find her identity in order to give deeper insight of her continuous conflict due to her battle of pleasing her mother's strict cultural belief and fitting in with America. Kingston is raised in America with parents who are only aware of Chinese lifestyle and not quick to adapt to the American lifestyle. Her mother tells her stories about women

  • Kingston's The Woman Warrior

    575 Words  | 3 Pages

    3.2. Criticism on Kingston’s The Woman Warrior Despite the fact that Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was a notable success, many scholars in various academic fields and fellow Chinese American writers heavily criticized her autobiography; its reason is that The Woman Warrior became one of the first canonized works among Chinese American literature (Lowe 76). The heated debates on the categorization of the genre were already presented in the second chapter of this paper. This subchapter however discusses

  • Native American Myth: Skunk Woman

    722 Words  | 3 Pages

    Native American Essay Skunk Woman is comparable to other Native American myths in terms of characteristics from Native American Literature because in the myth “Coyote finishes his work” it is about a coyote sent to earth to fix it and make it right and to create different people and then putting them in different parts of the world, that is similar to the the myth Skunk Woman because in the myth it speaks about how a man wanted to get a new life and forget about his past because of his bad temper

  • Analysis Of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

    935 Words  | 4 Pages

    Writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, in her excerpt “No Name Woman”, from her book The Woman Warrior, narrates a part of her history from the story of her family. Within her excerpt from paragraph 21 to paragraph 27, Kingston recounts a story of her aunt committing suicide after giving birth to an illegitimate child. Her purpose is to share and inform about her Chinese culture through her family’s past. She expresses an ambivalent tone while retelling her aunt’s story in order to appeal to contradictory

  • Straw Into Gold Sparknotes

    759 Words  | 4 Pages

    into Gold’ both have themes circulating their cultures. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a story where the narrator is a young girl with a deep rooted hatred for a quiet student as she is the opposite of a chinese woman's nature, as the book progresses she becomes more aggressive with her discontent for the young girl for her timid personality. Her resentment towards the student pushes her to physically assault her in which after the narrator falls ill and forgets how to speak herself

  • How Does Kingston Manipulate Stream Of Consciousness In The Woman Warrior

    589 Words  | 3 Pages

    Maxine Hong Kingston, a chinese woman who grew up in America, recounts her experiences first-hand in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Blending her own aspirations and characters throughout her book, Kingston delves upon lines of fiction and nonfiction, growing both characters and situations which rely on the basis of each other to form a coherent story. Kingston is able to effectively use character traits to develop unique situations, manipulate stream of consciousness techniques

  • Morality And Meaning In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

    949 Words  | 4 Pages

    I have a strong sense of morality, and the past few novels i have read emphasized the value of morality through God, carelessness, money and revenge Son an into to The Road (not sure what this means?) In Cormac McCarthy’s chilling post-apocalyptic book the value of morality is portrayed through God. The ideas of morality are in the words of the Boy. The Boy has grown up in a world where civilization has disappeared, where the trees and animals are long gone and the world is getting colder. Where

  • Cultural Encounter In The Joy Luck Club

    1739 Words  | 7 Pages

    and daughters. Tan structures the book into four sections, like a mahjong game, and the story unfolds as the ladies share their stories in vignettes. The author does an outstanding job of discussing and illustrating the cultural diaspora and conflicts in this outstanding novel. • The four Chinese mothers who immigrate to America are in search of a better life. They are in search of a better life, not only for themselves, but for their children as well. The book is centered on San Francisco in the

  • The Human Condition In Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

    1078 Words  | 5 Pages

    Many scholars have already analyzed and scrutinized over Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, but there is always something new to learn. In a quote by Michael Ovitz, he says, “ The generality of situations that humans face in 'getting along with each other and the world'”. He talking about the human condition. William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, almost the turn of the century. He was born in New Albany Mississippi, and where he grew up influenced much of his work. Later in his life, he won

  • Essay On Authoritative Parenting

    954 Words  | 4 Pages

    This paper focuses on the authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles, and discusses the differences and implications on children’s later adjustment. In the later section of the paper, it will be explained if the implications can be generalised to Singaporean families. I first interviewed a mother who described a situation when she discovered that her daughter, who was then nine years old, had stolen money from her. She was enraged and scolded her daughter for doing so, and proceeded to ask

  • Alzheimer's Short Story Babysitting Helen

    728 Words  | 3 Pages

    What do you know about Alzheimer's? Alzheimer's is a progressive disease that attacks the brain and affects all aspects of a person's life, it is fatal and made up mostly of memory loss and confusion symptoms, which increase as time goes by. My research on dementia has helped me broaden my understanding of the short story "Babysitting Helen". It taught me that Helen's symptoms, memory loss and confusion , trouble performing day-to-day tasks, and repeating of actions and words are normal for people

  • Memento Mori Movie Analysis

    988 Words  | 4 Pages

    2.Narrative Structure The narrative structure is about the content of the story and the way it is being told. It consists of the story plot, cast, setting (location) and genre. (Chatman, 1978) Memento a noir psychological thriller film based on a short story "Memento Mori" written by Jonathan Nolan. Memento is a Latin word which means an object kept as a reminder of a person or event. The plot is the protagonist's physical journey whereas the story is the protagonist's emotional journey. (Alcorn

  • The Woman Warrior Sparknotes

    1084 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a memoir filled with folklore and imagination, that takes the reader on a journey through growing up as a Chinese-American woman navigating the conflicting worlds. This journey is told through the young daughter's naive understanding of her mother's descriptive talk stories. The first chapter “No-Name Woman” is an excruciating tale of how the father’s sister was exiled from the family, killed her assumed daughter, and committed suicide for adultery. This

  • Lost Sister Cathy Song Summary

    716 Words  | 3 Pages

    Asian American Cathy Song drew closer to her Korean-Chinese ancestry, and was able to describe in a clear image of the two women she represent, one being the industrial American women and the other one being the Chinese caretaker. Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawaii making her an American by birth right. This fact did not keep her from engulfing her Korean-Chinese heritage. In the poem “Lost Sister”, Song isolates a young girl who struggles to find who she truly is in China, because of all the

  • Summary Of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

    906 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Maxine Hong Kingston’s nonfictional novel, The Woman Warrior, Kingston tells five different stories separated in chapters. Kingston wanted to express to her readers what it was like living a life as a Chinese-American. Not only did she have difficulties along the way but she also had to manage fitting in. She is constantly being put on the spot due to her parent’s Chinese traditions and her American lifestyle. The structure of The Woman Warrior focuses on both Chinese myths and her experiences