Critical thinking assignment

by Thang Tran, Qh.2010. E14, ULIS, VNU

1. From: Keroauc, Jack. (1950). The town and the city. The United States of America: Penguin books Ltd.

“There was all this gleeful demonism, and a thousand absorbing and wonderful things to be done, and parties and dances every week, and the fascinating vistas of new study, new languages, new knowledge – vistas that were just like the blue pine hills and the grey dimness to the north that they saw outside the classroom windows.”

“When all the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off in the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the wind swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn – you could stand in old Galloway Road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever.”

Comment:

The author used the method of repetition to emphasize the beauty of Galloway, where the story took place. “And” and “When” were used to make the story smoothly narrated, to make the readers completely into the flow of time and nature.

2. From: Dust Bowl – The Southern Plains in the 1930s

It fell across our city like a curtain

of black rolled down,

We thought it was our judgment, we thought

It was our doom.

(Woody Guthrie - “The Great Dust Storm”)

Comment:

The Dust Bowl is one of the tragedies in America’s history which caused devastating damage to the agriculture and human welfare. We can easily see that the author compared the dust storm with a “curtain of black rolled down”. This comparison is quite easy to understand as a natural phenomenon. The storm came, sweeping through the vast regions of Midwest, with small dark particles of sand that passed through every airtight doors. The movement of natural power is so powerful that it can destroy everything on its path.

3. From: Scott Ellsworth. Death in a promised land – the Tulsa race riot of 1921

“They found the business district to be burned-out shell. Their home – the building at Greenwood and Archer which also housed their confectionary – had been looted and burned. Their theater, too, was but bricks and ashes.”

Comment:

The history of the Tulsa riot is one chapter in the troubled history of racial violence in America. This is a brief description among thousands of cases in the Tulsa race riot. The author used the phrase “bricks and ashes”, which triggers the readers’ mind of a theater in raging fire. “Ashes” is the metaphor of remains after a fire. “Bricks”, in this case, is the metaphor of things crumbled down after a fire. This way of describing is unique and interesting.