Comparison/Contrast Exercise

Rhetorical Analysis:

Read through these excerpts from novels and an autobiography and think about the authors’ voice/persona, attitude toward the subject and audience, tone, and target audience(s). Remember that the author in the text (the persona) may not be speaking sincerely and sometimes is simply a fictional creation, not the same “person” in some ways as the real author in the real world.

Then, using the elements of the Rhetorical Situation (or Aristotle’s schema), compare and contrast the paragraphs below. Pay close attention to the way these professional authors use details and language. ------

From The House on Mango Street (Vintage Books, 1991) by Sandra Cisneros

Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa's hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos' hair is thick and straight. He doesn't need to comb it. Nenny's hair is slippery--slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur.

But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pin-curls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread. ______

From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

I had shut the door to. Then I turned around. and there he was. I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was scared now, too; but in a minute I saw I was mistaken -- that is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched, he being so unexpected; but right away after I saw him I wasn’t scared of him worth bothering about.

He was almost fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so were his long, mixed-up whiskers. There wasn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body's flesh crawl -- a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes -- just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on the other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor -- an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.

I stood looking at him; he sat there looking at me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle down. ------

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From Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother’s unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. I do not know how my grandmother got the way she was; I assume, from family photographs and from the inflexibility of her habits, that she was always the same, and it seems as idle to inquire into her childhood as to ask what was ailing Iago or look for the error in toilet training that was responsible for Lady Macbeth. My grandmother’s sexual history, bristling with infant mortality in the usual style of her period, was robust and decision: three tall, handsome sons grew up and one attentive daughter. Her husband treated her kindly. She had money, many grandchildren, and religion to sustain her. White hair, glasses, soft skin, wrinkles, needlework—all the paraphernalia of motherliness were hers; yet it was a cold, grudging, disputatious old woman who sat all day in her sunroom making tapestries from a pattern, scanning religious periodicals, and setting her iron jaw against any infraction of her ways.

Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy. The religious magazines on her on her table furnished her not with food for meditation but with fresh pretexts for anger; articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin and secular education were her favorite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others; “Honor thy father and thy mother,” a commandment she was no longer called upon to practice, was the one most frequently on her lips. The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for. Her mind was preoccupied with conversion; the capture of a soul for God much diverted her fancy—it made one less Protestant in the world. Foreign missions, with their overtones of good will and social service, appealed to her less strongly; it was not a harvest of souls that my grandmother had in mind.

The pugnacity of my grandmother’s did not confine itself to sectarian enthusiasm. There was also the defense of her furniture and her house against the imagined encroachments of visitors.

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