week文学批评.pptVIP

English Writing (2) Hao Guilian, Ph.D. Yunnan Normal University Fall, 2011 In-class presentation The outline of your essay writing: What is the focus (studying point) of your essay? How did you organize it? What standard did you have when you came to judge it the way you did? What is your conclusion? Read the essay together! THE FOURTH OF JULY (By Audre Lorde) Questions for Close Reading 1. What is the selections thesis (or narrative point)? Locate the sentence(s) in which Lorde states her main idea. If she doesnt state the thesis explicitly, express it in your own words. 2. In paragraph 4, Lorde describes the elaborate picnic her mother prepared for the trip to Washington, D.C. Why did Lordes mother make such elaborate preparations? What do these preparations tell us about Lordes mother? There were probably two reasons. On the one hand, by taking a variety of food with them on the trip, the family members could save some money, for dining car food was too expensive. On the other hand, as black people, they were not allowed into railroad dining cars at that time. 3. Why had the writers elder sister been prevented from going to Washington D.C. with her high school classmates? Because she was black and all her classmates were white and they would be staying in a hotel which did not rent rooms to Negroes. 4.Why did the writer spend the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial? And why had Marian Anderson sung at the Lincoln Memorial after the D.A.R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was Black? It was Lincoln, the American President, who liberated the blacks in America, who advocated freedom for the colored and who even sacrificed his life for the emancipation of the black people. Both the writer and Marian Anderson cherished the memory of this great man. Marian Anderson had sung at the Lincoln Memorial, also because she wanted to spread Lincolns noble ideas, to show that his noble ideas had not been real