Hi friends!Here is the link to the academic article I chose to analyse; it is a critic of a novel I had to read for my American Literature classes. The novel is "Praisong for the Widow" and it is beautiful: let me suggest you to read it! The article is a bit long but I think it is very well written and readable. "Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall's Praisong for the Widow" by Susan Rogers:http://findarticles.com/articles/mi_m2838/is_l_34/ai_62258907
Text cohesion:
There seems to be no sense of incompatibility between (pointing forward) the body as a source of knowledge and the importance of separating mind from body. These pointing backward) disparities will be discussed for what they can productively reveal about the difficulties of negotiating autonomy in a racist society. My thesis is that these contradictions (pointing backwards), rather than undermining the novel's integrity, go to the heart of the sense of diaspora disconnection which the book communicates. These tensions (pointing backwards)are expressive of attempts to escape bodies' limiting associations, while finding in an individual's body a source of identity denied by ideological denigration of black bodies.
Logical flow of ideas:
Through the processes of extreme physical discomfort, illness, purging, healing, bathing, and dancing, Avey is able to make an emotional journey that restores her awareness of he r cultural inheritance. I will argue, however, that the novel's portrayal of Avey's emotional and physical rebirth, while raising important questions about the cultural identity of African and Caribbean Americans, is disconcerting in terms of the suggestion that it is possible to return to an unmediated state of being, to a tabula rasa of mind and body.
Avey does not pity these people, however, but feels awe and respect for their determination to preserve their heritage against the odds. Furthermore, their fete livens up when they begin the creole dances which acknowledge not a specific traceable connection with African groups but a general ancestral connection
The novel's conclusion, then, posits a solution to Avey's crisis of cultural disinheritance that calls attention to the plural origins of African American culture. However, although much of the novel proposes that cultural identity has a certain grounding in physicality, its conclusion, by repeating her ancestor's refrain, remains anxious about such a grounding. The shifting approaches to physicality within the novel, therefore, communicate powerfully the impact of cultural disinheritance created by the African diaspora.
Text cohesion:
This paper aims to examine the way the body functions in the text not only as an indicator of personal consciousness, but also as a metaphor for African people's cultural disinheritance created by the African diaspora. It also aims to draw attention to the disparity presented in the novel between acknowledging the body as an avenue of expression and yet wanting to escape its limitations.
The text explicitly acknowledges the workings of social practice in contributing to an individual and collective understanding of physicality. Yet, simultaneously, events in the novel present a body's inherent knowledge as a resource for overcoming social and cultural disenfranchisement. Marshall's text does not confront its own contradictions: The differing attitudes to Avey's body are not addressed, but are presented as a coherent solution to her personal crisis.
The separation of mind and body, Christian states, "is characterized not as! fragmentation but as a source of Wisdom" (150). This separation was initially enabling for people of African descent because, while their bodies might have been enslaved, they were able to determine their freedom by recalling Africa "as the source of their being" (152).
In Marshall's novel the body, as a source of collective memory, functions as a crucial symbol of the need to discover, to recall the self, outside of hegemonic social and political prescriptions. Yet the text also imparts an astute awareness of the dangers, for black Americans, of focusing on corporeal locatedness in a society whose ruling classes designate blackness as subordinate. Despite Avey's search for a culturally complete self, the novel is unable to reconcile two very different understandings of bodily existence. Yet through this irreconcilability, as much as through the depiction of cultural reclamation, the novel exposes a pivotal feature of the diaspora experience it is concerned with relating.
Clarity:
The idea, suggested in the novel, that Avey's memories of Africa are an essential part of her being, while her American identity is a socially constructed one, is problematic.
It is in this section that Avey Johnson, the novel's protagonist, becomes aware of her body as a repository of memory, as a place where physical sensation echoes emotional feeling. This awareness is pivotal in Avey's progress from a state of denial to acceptance of her heritage. This essay aims to explore Marshall's construction of a fictional body as a site of cultural expression and memory. Avey's body communicates to her what she has taught her conscious mind to ignore: her disconnection from her own sense of herself and from the African-American and Caribbean heritage which is a crucial part of that self.
In my opinion these examples show that the text has a clear structure because the main topics are expressed in short simple sentences separated by full stops. Moreover, further clarification are introduced by semicolons.
The audience:
I think that this article is addressed both to university students as well as professors because it was written by a graduate student. Its style is simple but its content (in terms of theories and concepts) is complex and requires an educated audience.
Susan Rogers is a graduate student at Hull University in England. She is currently completing her Ph.D. thesis on constructions of embodiment in contemporary fiction concerned with the legacies of slavery.
In conclusion, I think that this article is readable because it developes different topics but they are linked in a logical way. Therefore, the text has cohesion and it is easy to read it critically.
As far as blog posts are concerned, I believe that they should be clear and cohesive and have a logical structure. They should be readable as well, I mean. They would become more attractive and easier to understand!
I think that writing blog posts is a nice and useful writing practice because it forces you to organise your thoughts in a logical way. Blogging is communication: an efficient communication on blogs is an efficient communication elsewhere!
