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A literary analysis by maya angelou
A literary analysis by maya angelou
A literary analysis by maya angelou
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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings: Cages
Maya Angelou wrote an amazing and entertaining autobiography titled I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, about her hard life growing up as a black girl from the South. Among the hardships are things known as "cages" as stated as a metaphor from Paul Dunbar's poem "Sympathy." "Cages" are things that keep people from succeeding in life and being everything they want to be. Some of Maya Angelou's cages include being black in the 1940's and her overbearing grandmother. In my life, a "cage" is my young age, this causes problems with adults.
A major "cage" from Maya Angelou's youth was that she was black in a prejudice southern town. Maya has recounted in her book the times when she was discriminated against. When she was working for a white woman named Mrs. Viola Cullinan, Mrs. Cullinan started calling her Mary, "That's [Margaret] too
long. She's Mary from now on."(pp.91) One of the most important aspects of a person is their name. It is a great insult for someone to change your name, without your consent. If Maya was white Mrs. Cullinan would not have changed her name and she did it only because of her racist friends and attitudes. Even some of the white adults who supposedly supported her had hidden their racist messages in seemingly nice speeches. Maya conveys the words of Mr. Edward Donleavy, one of the people in the masquerade, "The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Lousises."(pp.151) Maya was forced to listen to Mr. Donleavy's stereotypes of how white children could be thinkers and black children can only be athletes.
What was supposed to be an encouraging speech, which Mr. Donleavy probably thought was sincere, turned out to be just another racist and stereotypical speech. Perhaps it was not so much Mr. Donleavy's fault, because he was trying to be nice, but more of his upbringing. Racism was the most prominent of Maya's "cages" and it is probably due to the society and ignorant ideas.
The second major cage of Maya Angelou was that she has a very strict, religious, and overbearing grandmother. It is important that a child's guardian be caring and strict but that guardian should not be too strict.
For instance, we can take a look a Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both men were established members of the Republican Party. Now, both of these men took presidency in the 20th century. Theodore in 1901, and Ronald in 1981. So what happened in the 80 years that separated them? Well first, it is important to get a good look at their background information to help understand why each of them chose their style of leadership.
The novel, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", by Maya Angelou is the first series of five autobiographical novels. This novel tells about her life in rural Stamps, Arkansas with her religious grandmother and St. Louis, Missouri, where her worldly and glamorous mother resides. At the age of three Maya and her four-year old brother, Bailey, are turned over to the care of their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Southern life in Stamps, Arkansas was filled with humiliation, violation, and displacement. These actions were exemplified for blacks by the fear of the Ku Klux Klan, racial separation of the town, and the many incidents in belittling blacks.
Mengele was assigned in the Nazi army as a physician and surgical medic, who were greatly wanted by patients, however they were also feared. The most tremendous jobs he ever had, was of course his goal to find the key to heredity, and the selection of life or death. In other words Mengele was in charge of where people were sent, whether it is the working camps, or the crematory. Survivors today co...
Walker, Pierre A. Racial protest, identity, words, and form in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Vol. 22. West Chester: Collage Literature, n.d. Literary Reference Center. Web. 8 Apr. 2014. .
Posner, Gerald L., and John Ware. Mengele: The Complete Story. N.p.: n.p., n.d.Google Books. Web. 11
Mengele was born March 16, in the year 1911 in Bavaria to Karl Mengele previous to WWI. Karl his father, happened to be a manufacturer of farming. Furthermore out of his siblings Josef Mengele was the oldest of them all. Meanwhile during his family’s lifetime, they ran a machine tools business together. As Mengele grew older he became well-known in his town as well as being labeled extremely smart and intelligent. Education took up a large portion of his life soon after that. This included studying in the field of Philosophy at the University Munich, also going to Frank...
Maya Angelou was one of America’s greatest writers in history. She was known for her many writings and for her part in Civil Rights Movements. Maya Angelou went through many hardships during her childhood, the most prevalent of those, racism over her skin color. This racism affected where she grew up, where she went to school, even where she got a job. “My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drops s’s from plurals and suffixes from past tense verbs.” (Angelou 221) Maya Angelou was a strong believer in a good education and many of those beliefs were described in her
Overall I thought the book was a great piece of writing, depicting extremely important events in our history, in a different way than I am used to. Having a clear and defined perspective in the book made it much more enjoyable and relevant, and thus it had much more of an impact than simply reading about these events in a textbook, which I believe was Dee Brown’s goal in writing it. The history of the Native Americans is crucial to the history of America, and it is important that people understand the entirety of these events, because they shaped who and what we are today.
... the Compson, represented when she says to Frony and Luster, “I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” recognizes her time with the family, from the family’s previous success and their upcoming demise. Unlike the Compsons, Dilsey’s family will likely never reach their full potential because of the racially prejudiced and segregated society in which they live. (how does this fit)
Maya Angelou’s excerpt from her book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” reveals the challenges facing a young black girl in the south. The prologue of the book tells of a young Angelou in church trying to recite a poem she has forgotten. She describes the dress her grandmother has made her and imagines a day where she wakes up out of her black nightmare. Angelou was raised in a time where segregation and racism were prevalent in society. She uses repetition, diction, and themes to explore the struggle of a black girl while growing up. Angelou produces a feeling of compassion and poignancy within the reader by revealing racial stereotypes, appearance-related insecurities, and negative connotations associated with being a black girl. By doing this she forces the
The preludes which Bach composed were unique to his name, and contained a number of complex and awe-inspiring sections. His preludes were usually composed using a single rhythm and some sort of arpeggio. Such preludes are sometimes tiring and exhausting on the listener's ear, because they seem unending and ruthlessly written. Bach's consistent use of a busy but regular rhythm creates a driving force throughout the piece, and is known as motor rhythm. While the general public may rece...
Maya Angelou, the author to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, writes about a girl who is confronted with sex, rape, and racism at an early stage in her life in detail in her novel. When she is three years old, her parents have a divorce and send her and her four-year-old brother Bailey from California to Arkansas to live with her grandmother in a town that is divided by color and full of racism. They are raised by her grandmother and then sent back to their carefree mother in the absence of a father figure. At age eight, she is raped by her mother’s boy friend while she is sleeping in her mother’s bed. The book also tells about her other sexual experiences during the early parts in her life. Those experiences lead to the birth of her first child.
The Luxo brand USB Lamp has many attributes to keep consumers feeling safe, secure, and comfortable about their product. It has several features to fit different styles. You can purchase a USB Lamp with one USB port plug-in, or you can opt for the design that has multiple USB port plug-ins. The lamp is available in a variety of designs to fit the different interiors of each room in a household. It is also very flexible. You can swivel and turn it just about any way that you need. Another important feature is the location of the USB port on the lamp. The device is small enough to be placed in the base of the lamp, making it more appealing. There are many benefits of this products. It will have a surge protector so there are no electrical fires that break out. The product frees up outlet space. You do not have to have power strips plugged in to every outlet. The lighting is glare free, so you can enjoy reading or writing under the lighting of this lamp.
Besides Apples iPhone being one of the most expensive phones in the market right now, many of the other Smartphone competitors also engage in price wars with Samsung in attempt to pull market share away from both Samsung and Apple, the two largest Smartphone market shareholders. Engaging in price wars creates a big threat to Samsung because competitors are able to drop down prices for their phones in order to
In the excerpt “Mary”, Angelou recalls her poverty-stricken childhood and the struggles she went through while growing up in the racist south, post-slavery. Angelou remembers how she thought that white people were strange and had developed a negative attitude towards them. Though only ten years old, Angelou worked as a kitchen servant to a woman by the name of Mrs. Cullinan (Angelou 4). She remembers how her identity was taken away when Mrs. Cullinan and the white women that would visit Mrs. Cullinan. These women changed Angelou’s first name from Margaret to “Mary” without her consent because they felt that her name was too long to say (Angelou 5). Margaret and many other African Americans of her time felt that being called “called out of his or her name” in the south was considered to be as insulting as if they were being called “niggers, spooks, blackbirds, crows, or dinges”(Angelou 6). Maya had also encountered being calle...