Course Handout # 4

Requirement: Identify & discuss the literary strategies used by the authors included in the
handout, in terms of relevant political, social, and / or aesthetic ideologies. Use the relevant
information in the slides from Lectures/PPPs 4 and 5.

1. I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a
real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can
want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.
Every one is always busy with it, no one of them then ever want to know it that every one
looks like some one else and they see it. Mostly every one dislikes to hear it. It is very
important to me to always know it, to always see it which one looks like others and to tell it. I
write for myself and strangers. I do this for my own sake and for the sake of those who know
I know it that they look like other ones, that they are separate and yet always repeated. They
are some who like it that I know they are like many others and repeat it, there are many who
never can really like.
There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I
love it and I tell it, I love it and now I will write it. This is now the history of the way some of
them are it.
I write for myself and strangers. No one who knows me can like it. At least they mostly do
not like it that every one is of a kind of men and women and I see it. I love it and I write it.
(G. Stein, The Making of Americans)

2. Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way
that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered
in the direction of her eyes. The soft suggestion of her down slightly darkened, like the
shadow of a birds wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. Why, after noticing
it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. Her nose was aquiline, Semitic. If you have heard a
Jewish cantor sing, if he has toughed you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when
compared to his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like
mobile rivers, to their common delta. They were strange eyes. In this, that they sought
nothing that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see, and they gave
the impression that nothing was to be denied. (Jean Toomer, Fern)
3. Oh, Mother, cant you use a fork? exclaimed Rachel as Mrs. Ravinsky took the shell of the
baked potato in her fingers and raised it to the watering mouth. Here, Teacherin mine, you
want to learn me in my old age how to put the bite in my mouth? The mother dropped the
potato back into her plate, too wounded to eat. Wiping her hands on her blue-checked apron,
she turned her glance to her husband, at the opposite side of the table. Yankev, she said
bitterly, stick your bone on a fork. Our teacherin said you dassnt touch no eatings with the
hands. All my teachers died in the old country, retorted the old man. I aint going to learn
nothing new no more from my American daughter. He continued to suck the marrow out if
the bone with that nosy relish that was so exasperating to Rachel. (A. Yezierska, Children of
Loneliness)
4. The shelter from the storms of life that the artist finds in his art, Yankev Ravinsky found in
his prescribed communion with God. All the despair cause by his daughters apostasy, the
insults and disappointments he suffered, were in his sobbing voice. But as he entered into the
spirit of his prayer, he felt the man of flesh drop away in the outflow of God around him. (A.
Yezierska, Children of Loneliness)

5. God! God! she sobbed as she turned her head away from them, if all this suffering were at
least for something worth while, for something outside myself. But to have to break them
and crush them merely because I have a fastidious soul that cant stomach their table
manners, merely because I cant strangle my aching ambition to rise in the world. She could
no longer sustain the conflict which raged within her higher and higher at every moment.
With a sudden tension of all her nerves she pulled herself together and stumbled blindly
downstairs and out of her house. And she felt as if she had torn away from the flesh and
blood of her own body. (A. Yezierska, Children of Loneliness)
6. I have broken away from the old world; Im through with it. Its already behind me. I must
face this loneliness till I get to the new world. Frank Baker cant help me; I must hope for no
help from the outside. Im alone; Im alone till I get there. But am I really alone in my
seeking? Im one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering
between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in. (A. Yezierska, Children of
Loneliness)
7. THE CAMERA EYE

at the head of the valley in the dark of the hills on the broken floor of a lurched over
cabin a man halfsits halflies propped up by an old woman two wrinkled girls that might be young
chunks of coal flare in the hearth flicker in his face white and sagging as dough blacken the
caved-in mouth the taut throat the belly swelled enormous with the wound he got working on the
minetipple
the barefoot girl brings him a tincup of water the woman wipes sweat off his streaming
face with a dirty denim sleeve the firelight flares in his eyes stretched big with fever in the
women's scared eyes and in the blanched faces of the foreigners
without help in the valley hemmed by dark strikesilent hills the man will die (my father
died, we know what it is like to see a man die) the women will lay him out on the rickety cot the
miners will bury him () (J. Dos Passos, The Big Money)

8. MARY FRENCH

Mary French had to stay late at the office and couldn't get to the hall until the meeting was
almost over. There were no seats left so she stood in the back. So many people were standing in
front of her that she couldn't see Don, she could only hear his ringing harsh voice and feel the
tense attention in the silence during his pauses. When a roar of applause answered his last words
and the hall filled suddenly with voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet she ran out ahead of the
crowd and up the alley to the back door. Don was just coming out of the black sheetiron door
talking over his shoulder as he came to two of the miners' delegates. He stopped a second to hold
the door open for them with a long arm. His face had the flushed smile, there was the shine in his
eye he often had after speaking, the look, Mary used to tell herself, of a man who had just come
from a date with his best girl. It was some time before Don saw her in the group that gathered
round him in the alley. Without looking at her he swept her along with the men he was talking to
and walked them fast towards the corner of the street. (J. Dos Passos, The Big Money)