Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

Adrienne Rich was a feminist, writer, and poet. Many give Rich credit for helping women come out of the closet and accept their other rights. She is well educated and very influential in the emerging women's' rights movement. In her piece, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, Rich litters the pages with rhetorical techniques that create a fascinating read that convinces the reader of how much damage can be caused by women lying. 

Rich opens her piece with litotes . She explains the honors of a man and then how completely different the honors of women are. 

She also uses anaphora as a way to drive a point. On page 413 she repeats, "But the liar," on page 414, "It is important," on page 415, "Women have always," on page 417, "The liar is always" and "She is afraid". These are the points intended to drive home. And they do. 

Later, Rich uses colloquial writing and creates a new conversational aspect by referring to the reader as you. She writes, "It isn't that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you." This brings her more personally into my perception of her words and helps me feel even more connected to her. 

Rich ends her work with use of metonymy. She equates the ideas of truth and life by writing, "That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us." This captures what Rich wants the reader to leave with. Lying can damage you. She does an excellent job of achieving her purpose of teaching the audience this. 

The Truth Will Set You Free

You can cage yourself. 

John 8:32 http://dgillespi8034.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html 

The Future Is Now

The Future Is Now is written by Katherine Anne Porter and serves as a didactic piece in a time after bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lesson taught gives a look into life from an optimistic standpoint. A human's hope is to live a long life and he/she should do what makes them happy in that time. As Porter puts it, "At the very least, he is doing something he feel is worth doing now, and that is no small thing" (195). In her explaining of this Porter also states her hopes that while the world may seem like it is falling to pieces, it may just be it figuring out a way to put them all back together. 

Porter establishes her ethos in a few biblical references as well as in historical events and personal experiences. This creates an audience who may match a similar mind as Porter describes for herself when referencing the seeming eternity in the continuation of customs. She describes herself as one who "can be soothed with large generalities of that nature" (195), which has similar qualities to what she tries to do for her reader. Porter also has established ethos as she is respected in the written works community being a Pulitzer prize winner and bestselling author. 

Porter's work is very strong. She is able to use an allegory in a literal connection between her personal encounters in life with what abstract ideas she sees in the world. She is stating an opinion on bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki while also explaining how it can relate to life existentially. This makes it easy to understand exactly what her view is. She is not as much persuading the reader to agree with her, but is attempting to inform of what she has discovered in her life. 

Putting the Pieces Together

Perhaps the world is not falling apart, but coming together.



http://www.gcsu.edu/engagement/studentresearch/docs/15th_GC_Student_Research_Conference_Schedule_2012___Quick_Reference_Program.pdf 

Life With Daughters

Life with daughters is a piece in which Gerald Early writes of how he views Miss America contests. It is written from the perspective of an African American man with a wife and two daughters. Early is a professor of Modern letters but also for African and African American culture. He is well renowned and writes from a perspective that is his own. 

Early utilizes the rhetorical technique of parallelism between the American Beauty Pageant and dolls in order to explain to a broader audience of how this affects people. By comparing the two, the idea is seen in a specific and general way which helps the reader to understand both the influences. His piece is extremely strong because of his ability to appeal to so many aspects of what may be deemed female culture and he manages to explain so many wisdoms of life unearthed just through a television program he doesn't even really like. 

This piece was written for anyone who may be under the influence of societal culture, meaning nearly everybody. Through his work, Early equates American Beauty pagents to the doll industry to show how it can influence young black children. He compares what it was like for his wife to see only white women on stage and feel a kind of agitation towards the tradition to how his daughters know the competition with a diverse set of "women on parade"(532) . He discusses how his wife and sister grew up with white Barbies and how it could stir race pride amongst them as well as a feeling of lessness. His wife would not allow his daughters to have white dolls because of this and he discovers that his children still felt self-conscious because of their appearances despite the ban on the dolls. 

Early's purpose is to try to give the wisdom he found his daughters had in their approach to a pageant or dolls. Rather than deciding a person couldn't win the pageant because someone of their race had won in the past years, as their mother declared, they picked who they thought was best. They did not watch with feelings of lingering animosity but because it was so meaningless it was funny. Gerald Early's daughters had their two black Barbie's have a white child because, "We're not racial...Aren't you tired of all that racial stuff?" Early uses his childrens' innocent wisdom to bring awareness to the fact that sometimes you are taught that "nothing is something" and recognizing whether something is really something is what is important. 

Innocence is Wisdom

Sometimes being blind to what hate is around you can bring betterness into your life.

three blind mice nursery rhyme: 

http://rap.genius.com/175696/Mellowhype-copkiller/Blind-mice