ExternalizingBody
Revised Thesis: In “The Gentleman of Shalott,” “In the Waiting Room,” and “Pink Dog,” Bishop suggests that, by externalizing an image of the fragmented body, a subject imposes a sense of wholeness on his mental representation of the self. Instead of drafting two distinct “parts” that will occupy separate locations in my essay, I’ve included below a draft of the
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Here’s my tentative thesis and outline: Thesis: In “The Gentleman of Shalott,” “In the Waiting Room,” and “Pink Dog,” we find a half-body, a gendered body, and a diseased body, each suggestive of a corporeal “unwholeness” at the individual or communal scale. Bishop suggests that, by externalizng the unwhole physical body, one imposes on it a sense of wholeness. However,
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In my previous post, I threw out there a rather “disorganized conglomerate” of loosely connected ideas. Now I’ll try to flesh them out a little bit, and see if I can come up with a more coherent picture of what my final essay will eventually be about. My tentative selection of poems are “From Trollope’s Journal,” “Going to the Bakery,”
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As Ryan explains, colonization begins when a more militarily advanced group of people encounters a less militarily advanced group (194). The “First World,” or colonizing, people, imposes its culture on the colonized people. In this process, the colonists may devise certain figures of speech to support imperialism. In The Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, Murfin and Ray introduce Edward Said’s
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As I skimmed through The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, I found that the theme of illness recurs in several poems. In “From Trollope’s Journal,” “Going to the Bakery,” and “Pink Dog,” Bishop seems to use illness as a metaphor for the symptoms of adhering to capitalist ideology. (Now what you’ll read next is more like a disorganized conglomerate of ideas, and
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In his introduction to ethnic studies, Ryan observes that our ethnicity is, in fact, a result of our reproductive behavior. We look a certain way because our parents chose to have children with somebody with certain looks; our “internal biological reality” is “an effect of social practice” (178). We might think of our traits as something stable, as natural “essences”
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In her poem “Roosters,” Bishop questions the legitimacy of male-dominated rule. Lines 54-5 reiterate her overarching theme as she asks the roosters, “what right have you to give / commands and tell us how to live”? Indeed, what makes male dominance “legitimate”? Initially, the setting reveals to us the apparent ubiquity of roosters, as indicated by their cries. We hear
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When Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the theory of binary opposition, wherein each word is defined by what it is not, he opened the door to such critical approaches as psychoanalysis, political criticism, and gender and ethnic studies. In psychoanalytic theory, the conscious mind sustains its dominance by “denying the reality of the unconscious” (98). On a larger scale, binary opposition
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In her poem “A Miracle for Breakfast,” Bishop seems to distort the meaning of miracles. She suggests that, ironically, a miracle for one person necessitates the slavery of another. Bishop’s choice of form for this poem–the sestina–reflects the structured, repetitive nature of human labor. (At the same time, this complex form also manifests the poet’s hard labor.) This rigid structure
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