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Racism in literature
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The Death of Identity in DeLillo's White Noise
In addition to addressing the premonitory electricity of death, the title of Don DeLillo's White Noise alludes to another, subtler, sort of white noise - the muted death of suburban white identity. College-on-the-Hill is not only an elite academic promontory, but also a bastion for white flight in which Jack Gladney's family has taken refuge. Instead of John Winthrop's clear City-on-a-Hill morality, DeLillo presents us with J.A.K. Gladney's muddled postmodern inheritance of J.F.K.'s civil rights legacy. Racial identity no longer demarcates a simple binary between whites and Native Americans, but complicates a nation in which all races stake a claim towards American nativity. Jack's inability to classify the Other in obvious racial terms feeds back into his own identity crisis; unable to gauge what he is not, he is left without the tools necessary to understand what he is. This anxiety of faulty racial organization leaves Jack with America's preeminent homegrown product, consumerism, as a cultural machete for cutting through swaths of identity. But consumerism, exemplified by the supermarket's position as the novel's locus of societal reflection, is a philosophy too scattered and massive to equip Jack with any ordered understanding of race. Furthermore, any insight consumerism might yield is negated by its production of a confusing strain of commercial colonialism. The most feasible "solution," although the novel's persistent chaos denies any clear answers, is for Jack to accept racial hybridization and regard the world not as white noise and black clouds, but as shades of gray. This diminishes his anxiety for a need to identify others and, consequently, him...
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Interviews with Don DeLillo. April 1998. Berkeley. March 1998. http://haas.berkeley.edu/~gardner/ddinterviewes.html
Jackson, Jon. A letter from Don DeLillo. 25 April 1998. http://www.panix.com/~iayork/Literary/Whitenoise/WN10.html
Sippey, Michael. White Noise on White Noise. 25 April 1998. http://www.theobvious.com/noise/toc.html
White Noise. April 1998. Berkeley. March 1998. http://haas.berkelye.edu/~gardner/whitenoise.html
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Australian humour is very unique to Australia. This individual sense of humour is not often found in other Westernised cultures and people from those places may have difficulty understanding it. In some places, the characteristics of Australian humour may not even be considered acceptable behaviour and it would be breaking the law to do so. For example, in Australia, people are free to make jokes about the government, but in other countries this may not be accepted. Some unique and important characteristics of Austral...
Many of these students require intensive instruction to maintain the academic skills they have been taught and to improve their academic deficits. For many students with E/BD, achievement problems are particularly troublesome in the area of reading (Maughan, Pickles, Hagell, Rutter, & Yule, 1996). Unfortunately, there has been very little published research in the area of reading instruction with this population of students. In their review of reading interventions in the area of E/BD, Coleman and Vaughn (2000) identified only eight published studies that reported the results of reading interventions for students with E/BD. The majority of these studies were conducted with students younger than 12 years of age.
Prostitution has always been a worldwide problem for hundred years, especially in Thailand. Thai prostitution is now one of the industries that make millions of money to Thailand in a year. The attention to most of the tourists has been given directly to the nightlife here or prostitution rather than the quality of our own natural attractions such as beaches, mountains, or even a shopping facility in Thailand which is being considered as one of the great shopping paradises in South East Asia. Prostitution is an act of violence and should be banned.
It is a “reading world” we live in and students should be guaranteed every opportunity to succeed in this information driven society. Children today are overwhelmed with more reading material than ever before on billboard, television, the Internet and at school, causing reading to become a relevant and essential need in the life of every child (Lumpkin 1972). Being able to read has become the core of our information driven society. Yet, reading difficulties continue to plague the foundation of our education system creating a problem that only seems to be escalating. Hasselbring affirms that reading difficulties are a serious concern to our nation’s students claiming that, “as many as 20 percent of 17 year olds... [are] functionally illiterate and 44 percent of all high school students…[are] described as semi-illiterate”(2004). This is a harsh reality to face – a reality that stems from difficulties developed at the elementary level where reading complications arise and usually go unchecked. These reading difficulties are carri...
Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, advocates that there is a certain relationship between being-in-itself, matters, and being-for-itself, human beings with consciousness in his book Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, Nothingness is a transcendent being, which means something lack, caused by asking questions.