Hybridity in Ezekiel Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue The criticism that Mphahlele's awareness of his being a "hybrid' person imparts an inability to his being able to "write his story himself " is a criticism contrived out of literal derivations of the Greek components of the word "autobiography". The textual landscape of Down Second Avenue includes many varied and detailed arenas, the rural setting and its many dimensions, the city and its many dimensions. In the sense that autobiography is part of the genre of biography in the postclassical European tradition, that being the life accounts of saints and princes, the criticism is perhaps true to some extent. However, in the aspect of the autobiography being a search for identity and hybridity being the essence of Down Second Avenue, it is hybridity per se that is the author's story. A genre is works classified in terms of shared characteristics. 1 In studying the advent of autobiography as a genre in its own right, it would seem to be a particularly modern form of literature, a hybrid form of biography. Also, the distinctions between the forms of the biography, personal history or diary and novel are becoming questioned in that the autobiography is not an account of wisdom accumulated in a lifetime but a defining of identity. 2 The word "hybrid" is usually used in conjunction with genetic analysis of plants. A hybrid in its biological context is sometimes a sterile offshoot. Hybrid can be defined as "mixed ancestry" As a word; "hybrid" carries denotations of the physical as well as the metaphysical. In Down second Avenue, Mphahlele examines both a hybrid society, that being South Africa 1930- 50 as well as its composite sub-societies, extensively hybrid within themselves. Mphahlele's awareness of having a mixed ancestry is rooted in more than one dichotomy. His rural identity is opposed to his urban identity, his vocation as a teacher/academic is opposed to his employment as a messenger boy, his introspective nature opposed to his being member of a gang. His acute understanding of South African society is ironic in his feeling liberated in departing from it. It is in hybridity that Mphahlele's identity resides. Mphahlele sequentially chronicles the story of his own life from early childhood to his departure from the country to take up a teaching post in Nigeria. Throughout Down Second Avenue, Mphahlele expresses a feeling of powerlessness and sterility until he embarks upon leaving the country.
Within this existential consideration, Richardson (2000) finds autoethnography as a writing style - combining the readable style of autobiography into the ethnographic approach - which may produce something that will make it off the shelf. If relevant research is what is intended to be produced, then its readability must be a primary
I began a study of autobiography and memoir writing several years ago. Recently I discovered two poets who believe that recording one’s place in history is integral to their art. Carol Muske and Joy Harjo are renowned poets who explore the intricacies of self in regards to cultural and historical place. Muske specifically addresses the poetics of women poets, while Harjo addresses the poetics of minority, specifically Native American, writers. Both poets emphasize the autobiographical nature of poetry. Muske and Harjo regard the self as integral to their art. In this representation of self, Muske and Harjo discuss the importance of truth-telling testimony and history in their poetics. Muske says, “…testimony exists to confront a world beyond the self and the drama of the self, even the world of silence—or the unanswerable…” (Muske 16).
When inditing, authors incline to tell their own personal story through their literature work, sometimes done unknowingly or deliberately. Albeit some components of the author’s work are fabricated and do not connect with their own personal lives whatsoever, this is sometimes what causes a reader to do their own research about the author and their background of the story. Upon researching Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety, one may discover that he did indeed, reveal bits and pieces of his own experiences in his novel. “You break experience up into pieces and you put them together in different amalgamations, incipient cumulations, and some are authentic and some are not… It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be apprehensive about
When I decide to read a memoir, I imagine sitting down to read the story of someone’s life. I in vision myself learning s...
Racial and ethnic identity are crucial elements in the framework for individual and communal identity in our society. Deep values through religion and family create a sense of racial and ethnic identity and are manifested in sensible ways for many distinct minority populations in the United States. Individuals with these beliefs have different cultural values that are undesirable in mainstream American society. For others, on the other hand, especially white Americans, ethnic and racial identity are virtually invisible because societal normality is usually constructed around their ethnic, racial and cultural values. We commonly refer to them as the “standard American culture.” In Native Speaker, the protagonist, Henry Park, is unable to define himself in American society. This essay will discuss Park’s cultural self and his path to discovering himself in relationship to his family, friends, and the United States, as well as drawing in personal experiences that relate to Park’s.
In these essays, the authors are telling a story about the characters life. The stories are directed towards the audience to express the kind of pain and suffering the characters went through to learn and apply what they had been yearning for.
3. I felt that The Age of The Literary Memoir Is Now by James Atlas has had an impact on me as a writer because the introducti...
Written stories differ in numerous ways, but most of them have one thing in common; they all have a narrator that, on either rare occasions or more regularly, help to tell the story. Sometimes, the narrator is a vital part of the story since without him or her, it would not be possible to tell the story in the same way, and sometimes, the narrator has a very small role in the story. However, he or she is always there, and to compare how different authors use, and do not use, this outside perspective writing tool, a comparison between Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly will be done.
..., it is called purebred. Self-fertilization produces purebred pea plants. As you can see Mendel also altered plants and transferred pollen by hand. By controlling pollination and preventing self-fertilization, Mendel crossbred plants, producing hybrids. A hybrid is an organism that receives different forms of a genetic trait from each parent.
A narrative is constructed to elicit a particular response from its audience. In the form of a written story, authors use specific narrative strategies to position the ‘ideal reader’ to attain the intended understanding of the meanings in the text. Oliver Sacks’ short story The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an unusual short story because it does not display conventional plot development; the story does not contain conflict or resolution of conflict. The genre of the story is also difficult to define because it reads as an autobiographical account of an experience Sacks had with a patient while working as a neurologist. Although it is arguable that the narrative is a work of non-fiction, it is nevertheless a representation, distinct from a reflection of the real events. It is a construction, Sacks chose the elements that were included and omitted in the narrative and used narrative strategies to position readers to process the signs in the text and produce reach the dominant understanding. This blurring of truth and fiction is similar to that in the genre of ‘new journalism’. Although, rather than being a journalist writing a fictional piece of journalism, Sacks is a doctor writing a fictional medical analysis. To influence readers’ comprehension of the narrative, Sacks utilised the point of view strategy of subjective narration, atypical in this short story in that a characterisation or representation of Oliver Sacks is the narrator and Oliver Sacks the person is the real author. The story is character-driven rather than plot-driven and regardless of how accurate a depiction of the real people the characters are, they are constructions. Sacks gave the characters of Doctor P. and his namesake admirable and sympathetic trait...
This personal narrative is attained only because of the important role History plays in tying these factors together. In order for one to relate identity to difference using the dialogical method, he/she must “position [themselves] somewhere in order to say anything at all.” This position is attained through an understanding of history; a history which...
Authors are frequently categorized in some ways by the particular era they are writing in. This often gives a sense of what message the speaker is trying to relay, and the context in which the author is writing. Addressing the issue of self identity through this context allows a
In Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible man, the unknown narrator states “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was…I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself the question which I, and only I, could answer…my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” (13). throughout the novel, the search for identity becomes a major aspect for the narrator’s journey to identify who he is in this world. The speaker considers himself to be an “invisible man” but he defines his condition of being invisible due to his race (Kelly). Identity and race becomes an integral part of the novel. The obsession with identity links the narrator with the society he lives in, where race defines the characters in the novel. Society has distinguished the characters in Ellison’s novel between the African and Caucasian and the narrator journey forces him to abandon the identity in which he thought he had to be reborn to gain a new one. Ellison’s depiction of the power struggle between African and Caucasians reveals that identity is constructed to not only by the narrator himself but also the people that attempt to influence. The modernized idea of being “white washed” is evident in the narrator and therefore establishes that identity can be reaffirmed through rebirth, renaming, or changing one’s appearance to gain a new persona despite their race. The novel becomes a biological search for the self due through the American Negroes’ experience (Lillard 833). Through this experience the unknown narrator proves that identity is a necessary part of his life but race c...
In the story “Two Kinds”, the author, Amy Tan, intends to make reader think of the meaning behind the story. She doesn’t speak out as an analyzer to illustrate what is the real problem between her and her mother. Instead, she uses her own point of view as a narrator to state what she has experienced and what she feels in her mind all along the story. She has not judged what is right or wrong based on her opinion. Instead of giving instruction of how to solve a family issue, the author chooses to write a narrative diary containing her true feeling toward events during her childhood, which offers reader not only a clear account, but insight on how the narrator feels frustrated due to failing her mother’s expectations which leads to a large conflict between the narrator and her mother.
“In my estimation a good book first must contain little or no trace of the author unless the author himself is a character. That is, when I read the book I should not feel that someone is telling me the story but t...