Ranking the essays so far.....

Because none of these essays could really identify with what my personal essay is going to revolve around it is hard for me to rank the rest of them after my first choice. My first choice is Jamaica Kincaid's " Biography of a Dress". I chose this essay because it encompasses those small moments in my life that made all the difference in my life and that I remember until this day. The essay gave vivid accounts of her childhood and her relationship with her mother. I want to go into the relationship that I had with my grandmother's and what I am feeling twenty years after my mother's murder. I want to reflect on the good times, the bad times, and how every moment has shaped my life for better or worse. Reflection into personal experiences is the criteria for my essay and I feel as though "Biography of a Dress" provides the best depiction of that, so just in terms of a correlation between the style with which I am going to write this essay and what I hope to accomplish with it "Biography of a Dress" is the best choice for me.

"My Father Always Said"

The focus of this essay is centered around "heritage". It is about the appreciation of one's own heritage and family lineage. One section talked about a father leading his family out of Nazi Germany and into the states, specifically, Queens, N.Y. The section talked about the pride associated with Rindheim; in the very first line Schwartz says, " For years I heard the same line: "In Rindheim, you didn't do such things!" It was repeated whenever the American world of his daughters took my father by surprise." Right away I got the impression that Rindheim was held to a different standard by the father and was used as a reminder of origin when he felt that his daughters were becoming too "americanized". The rest of the essay seemed to be about the building of a new heritage in the area that they inhabited. The essay became more about Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx and by the end of the essay even the ever prideful father was taken by this new lifestyle.

Kincaids essay/what it added to ideas of creative non fiction that are not so strong in the other readings

Kincaid's essay gives more in the way of a vivid depiction even to what the reader might consider to be insignificant moments in her life. I say that because it is shown in the first couple of lines when she says, " the dress i am wearing in this black and white photograph, taken when i was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin" and then she goes in to the texture of the fabric and where it was first manufactured. later on in the essay she discusses how the shade of yellow in her dress was the same shade of yellow as boiled cornmeal and how her mother wanted her to eat yellow cornmeal because it was cheap and how her thought that foods that were colored yellow, green, or orange were rich in vitamins. These were moments in her childhood that are shown to the reader in the most vividly depicted way possible, after reading the essay I felt like I was a friend of hers during her childhood.

My definition of CNF

I define creative non fiction as a dramatic or theatrical account of real life stories or scenarios.

9/17/2009

anything in that page