Beautiful Texts

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Beautiful Texts?
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One Hundred Years of Solitude

• By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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The Initial Awe

• Picturesque writing style
• Language, syntax
• Long musical sentences
• Appeal to senses
• Magical Realism
• Tone tragically beautiful, peaceful
• Flow stream of conscious writing
• Suspending Disbelief
• Cyclic time Timeless
• Detachment of author- no judgment/bias
• Themes Love, Solitude, War, Family

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• When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave
  off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only
  an enormous transparent block with infinite
  internal needles in which the light of the sunset
  was broken up into colored stars
• Its the largest diamond in the world.
• No, the gypsy countered. Its ice.

• The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred
  Years of Solitude was based on the way my
  grandmother used to tell stories. She told things
  that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she
  told them with complete naturalnessWhat was most
  important was the expression she had on her face.
  She did not change her expression at all when
  telling her storiesI tried to tell the story
  without believing in it. I discovered that what I
  had to do was believe in them myself and write
  them with the same expression with which my
  grandmother told them with a brick face.

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More Awe The Characters

• Beauty in the characters actions
• Jose Arcadio saves his brother
• Ursula always keeps things together, strength of
  the town.
• Characters use imagination to imprison
  themselves. Beautiful?

• Too many characters- inhibits identifying with
  them limits beauty of piece when it is hard to
  find beauty in the characters.
• Protagonist the town Macondo

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The Provoked Wonder

• What makes this piece universally beautiful?
• What is the moral message? What am I suppose to
  take from this book or is there anything I am
  suppose to take from this book?
• Can I find it beautiful without taking any
  personal message from it?
• What really is magical realism and where do we
  draw the line between magical realism and
  fantasy?
• Is the old testament magical realism?

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The Search For Answers

• Anabellas interpretation of the message
  Nothing Matters
• Who Cares that any of it took place?
• The town is cut-off/ invisible to the rest of the
  world, but means everything to the inhabitants.
• Application to personal life personal issues
  mean nothing to the rest of the world

• Theres beauty in merely being lost in the
  language, flow, the experience.
• The mere enjoyment of the story telling it and
  being audience to it

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• Mr. Garcia Marquez has done nothing less than to
  create in the reader a sense of all that is
  profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life.
• -William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• By Maya Angelou

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Differences that are Beautiful

• 1st person narrative vs. 3rd person omniscient
  more of a one-on-one story / More connection with
  the protagonist
• The presence of the authors voice
• Biography vs. Fiction the story actually took
  place / her personal struggle
• How the different characters dealt with adversity
  rise above it or succumb to it
• Motivational message vs. Tragic Acceptance
  message

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Similarities that are Beautiful

• Lyrical, poetic language
• Stream of conscious writing
• Actions of the characters
• Mayas growth, strength, perseverance, and wisdom

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A Colorful Quote fromI Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings

• Momma bought two bolts of cloth each year for
  winter and summer clothes. She made my school
  dresses, underslips, bloomers, handkerchiefs,
  Baileys shirts, shorts, her aprons, house
  dresses and waists from the rolls shipped to
  Stamps by Sears and Roebuck. Uncle Willie was
  the only person in the family who wore
  ready-to-wear clothes all the time. Each day, he
  wore fresh white shirts and flowered suspenders,
  and his special shoes cost twenty dollars. I
  thought Uncle Willie sinfully vain, especially
  when I had to iron seven stiff starched shirts
  and not leave a cats face anywhere.-pg. 50

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• To describe my mother would be to write about a
  hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing,
  falling colors of a rainbow.It is remarkable how
  much truth there is in the two expressions
  struck dumb and love at first sight. My
  mothers beauty literally assailed me. Her red
  lips (Momma said it was a sin to wear lipstick)
  split to show even white teeth and her
  fresh-butter color looked see-through clean. Her
  smile widened her mouth beyond her cheeks beyond
  her ears and seemingly through the walls to the
  street outside. I was struck dumb. I knew
  immediately why she had sent me away. She was
  too beautiful to have children. I had never seen
  a woman as pretty as she who was called Mother.
  Bailey on his part fell instantly and forever in
  love. I saw his eyes shining like hers he had
  forgotten the loneliness and the nights when we
  had cried together because we were unwanted
  children. He had never left her warm side or
  shared the icy wind of solitude with me. She was
  his Mother Dear and I resigned myself to his
  condition. They were more alike than she and I,
  or even he and I. They both had physical beauty
  and personality, so I figured it figured.-pg. 60

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• The amount and variety of foods would have
  found approval on the menu of a Roman epicure.
  Pans of fried chicken, covered with dishtowels,
  sat under benches next to a mountain of potato
  salad crammed with hard-boiled eggs. Whole
  rust-red sticks of bologna were clothed in
  cheese-cloth. Homemade pickles and chow-chow,
  and baked country hams, aromatic with cloves and
  pineapples, vied for prominence. Our steady
  customers had ordered cold watermelons, so Bailey
  and I chugged the striped-green fruit into the
  Coca-Cola box and filled all the tubs with ice as
  well as the big black wash pot that Momma used to
  boil her laundry. Now they too lay sweating in
  the happy afternoon air.
• The summer picnic gave ladies a chance to
  show off their baking hands. On the barbecue
  pit, chickens and spareribs sputtered in their
  own fat and a sauce whose recipe was guarded in
  the family like a scandalous affair. However, in
  the ecumenical light of the summer picnic every
  true baking artist could reveal her prize to the
  delight and criticism of the town. Orange sponge
  cakes and dark brown mounds dripping Hersheys
  chocolate stood layer to layer with ice-white
  coconuts and light brown caramels. Pound cakes
  sagged with their buttery weight and small
  children could no more resist licking the icings
  that their mothers could avoid slapping the
  sticky fingers.-pg. 138

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And Still I Rise By Maya Angelou

• You may shoot me with your words, You may cut
  me with your eyes, You may kill me with your
  hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise.
• Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a
  surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At
  the meeting of my thighs?
• Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up
  from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a
  black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and
  swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind
  nights of terror and fear I rise Into a
  daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise
  Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am
  the dream and the hope of the slave.
• I rise I rise I rise.

• You may write me down in history With your
  bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the
  very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does
  my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with
  gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
  Pumping in my living room.
• Just like moons and like suns, With the
  certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing
  high, Still I'll rise.
• Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and
  lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like
  teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries.
• Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take
  it awful hard 'Cause I laugh like I've got gold
  mines Diggin' in my own back yard.

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The Final Evaluation

• Expectations vs. Deliverance. Enter the piece
  open-mindedly / untainted by previous knowledge.
• Beauty surfaces when the purpose of the piece is
  discovered
• Yet, beauty can be initially there as well just
  experiencing the story