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Contemporary Literature Videos 18 videos
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Contemporary Literature 7 Language of Social Progress 62 Views
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Description:
Contemporary works of literature such as The Help reference important historical events in order to reflect on themes and challenges that have repeated themselves throughout American history.
Transcript
- 00:00
Thank you We sneak in Contemporary fiction isn't vacuum it's
- 00:20
not as though you could draw a clear line in
- 00:22
nineteen forty or nineteen forty five where everything changes and
- 00:25
we don't have to care about history any more Contemporary
- 00:28
american literature is actually a way for us to reflect
Full Transcript
- 00:31
on the themes and challenges that have repeated themselves over
- 00:34
and over in american history while writing about civil rights
- 00:39
In his letter from a birmingham jail martin luther king
- 00:42
jr uses classical rhetorical devices and he's also very much
- 00:47
in line with what frederick douglass is doing when he
- 00:51
writes his autobiography they're both trying to prove that african
- 00:56
americans are as i guess noble or even in a
- 01:00
basic way as human as anyone else That's also what
- 01:04
phyllis wheatley is doing Phyllis wheatley is obsessed with latin
- 01:07
words and classical tropes on dh that's again in like
- 01:12
a long line of americans from actually the early colonists
- 01:18
uh just trying to prove that they're like worthy and
- 01:21
well educated and idealistic and deserve to explore their ideas
- 01:25
in freedom and in peace The help was published in
- 01:34
two thousand nine But it's a work of historical fiction
- 01:37
which is also very common in this area books that
- 01:40
actively take up things that happened in the past So
- 01:44
it's a story of a young girl growing up in
- 01:45
sort of the pre civil rights american south and black
- 01:50
nanny who she watches as she undergoes kind of racism
- 01:56
and discrimination that uh that you experience in this period
- 02:00
in this place It's A really interesting novel because it's
- 02:04
not written in what you might think of as like
- 02:07
standard or proper american english it's written in a dialect
- 02:12
so you've got a sense of how people would have
- 02:15
talked in that time and in that place it connects
- 02:19
to fred douglas is work where he doesn't write in
- 02:23
dialect but he does write in a very specific way
- 02:26
for a specific reason He writes in actually quite sophisticated
- 02:31
english in order to make an argument about himself as
- 02:34
an educated man contemporary fiction is often really invested in
- 02:39
what language signals down Teo What do your choices aboard 00:02:45.158 --> [endTime] say about us A person's
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