In the 1980s, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome(AIDS) struck the United States and initially impacted the gay community the hardest. A homosexual man himself, Thom Gunn saw, firsthand, the effect AIDS had on the gay community when he lost many friends. An elegy to those taken too soon and an ode to those still fighting, Gunn wrote “The Man with Night Sweats.” In “The Man with Night Sweats,” Gunn utilizes tactile, visual, and kinesthetic imagery to convey the threefold progression of confusion, reflection, and helplessness those face when battling AIDS. In the beginning stanzas, Gunn incorporates tactile imagery of heat and cold as the man wakes to formulate the confusion those with AIDS experience in the beginning of their illness. Waking in the middle of the night, the speaker is disturbed from his passionate dreams. Although he is sweating, he feels cold: “I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat” (1-2). Sweating is typically an indicator for the man that he is thriving, but now, for an unknown reason, he is cold. The coldness he feels demonstrates to him that the sweating is no longer coming from heated dreams, rather they are a response to something else, something he hasn’t experienced before. By including tactile imagery, Gunn displays the early perplexity of a disease. In addition to tactile imagery, …show more content…
Gunn connects tactile imagery with the puzzlement that comes along as an illness first presents itself, visual imagery as patients thinks about how their body is deteriorating, and kinesthetic imagery when the person comes to understand that they no longer have power over their body. While Gunn may have drawn inspiration from his experience with AIDS, the poem is universal in that it can be a testament to the transition from strength to fragility when one is faced with a hardship of any
David Román creates excellent perspective into the haven and necessity of theatrical arts for homosexual Latino 's in Chapter 6 of Intervention entitled "Teatro Viva!" Román reveals that progressing as a community requires gay Latino men and women to use the theatre as a tool to break the socio-silence surrounding the idea of homosexuality and the AIDS virus. In this case, the region of Los Angeles, California is accounted for as having an enormous amount of input having to do with the de-marginalization of homosexual Hispanics in the world. "Teatro VIVA!" is the name of a Los Angeles county short-skit theatrical outreach program that provided a bilingual education of the gay Latino community confronted with AIDS during the early nineties. This chapter helps by providing the reader with a detailed record of many such performance acts in the Los Angeles around that time.
The human mind is sometimes stronger than the human body itself. In James Hurst’s short story, “The Scarlet Ibis,” a boy named Doodle was pushed to his limits to overcome his struggles. Due to Doodle’s restraints and disabilities, trying new things and building strength to keep up with everyone else was his favorite thing, his mind was full of determination and vigor; this demonstrated irony of how fragile things are sometimes the strongest and the symbolism of the scarlet ibis’ compatibility to Doodle weaknesses. Strength of the mind is more powerful than strength of the body; therefore, Doodle’s strength is being compared to the scarlet ibis by showing his physical impairments and powerful mind to the significance of symbolism. The scarlet
Even to this day, shame about one’s sexual orientation remains a prominent topic. Whether one identified themselves as gay, lesbian, and transgender, society viewed them and their actions as a sin, a crime, and a disease, which only increased the amount of shame–a painful feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or fooling behavior–they saw within themselves. Then changes began to occur as a group of gays, lesbians, and transgender people confronted police in an event known as the Stonewall Riots or the Stonewall Uprising, which became a turning point for gay liberation. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a 1980s, family tragicomic-graphic memoir that addresses this perspective turning point through the use of the labyrinth
The article reveals the racism that gay men and women deal with within the black culture. It speaks on, an unspoken action that is ignored in the African American community. Lorde (1984) speaks about the African American women smuggles as a lesbian, Icard (1986) speaks no how the African American male is seen an inferior. Loiacano
In the reading by Peter Redman, he raises the argument that the ‘AIDS carrier” becomes the central representation of the HIV epidemic and how the representations of HIV cannot be narrowed down to one cause. In addition, the ‘AIDS carrier’ is represented as monster and the carrier spreads HIV from the deviant subpopulations to the mainstream. Also, AIDS has been connected to social and moral issues and singles out groups like gay men, black people, and young single women. These groups are then viewed as diseased subpopulations and that causes others to feel disgust and panic. The heterosexual men are then afraid to have physical or emotional contact with men in general and that’s why boundaries of heterosexual masculinity were produced.
In the short story Sweat written by Zora Neale Hurston, she tells the story of a hard-working woman named Delia Jones and her abusive, cheating husband Sykes. Delia and Sykes are drastically different characters. Delia is an honest, church going woman, who cleans white people 's laundry to make ends meet and Skyes is a low-down womanizer who uses his wife 's income to support not only himself but also Bertha the woman he is having an affair with. After years of putting up with her husband 's mistreatment, Delia finally holds her ground. She defends her job with a skillet.
(Gilman 445). This impactful sentence proves to the audience that when the day for the woman to leave the room came, her sickness was now in full control of her mind and she embraced it. The personification used in the short story followed the reactions of how the ill
As Elie Wiesel had noted, “It was cold. We got into our bunks. The last night in Buna. Once more, the last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the cattle car, and, now, the last night night in Buna.
Change and hope are what gets people through life but sometimes how it’s presented to us is more important than the message itself. In the poem, “New Days Lyric”, the author, Amanda Gorman, describes the experience she and others around her had when it came to COVID-19. The poem embarks on a mental journey where Gorman describes from beginning to end the effect the coronavirus had on the world and how everyone overcame it. The author also uses a point in the world (the coronavirus) that everyone experienced in order to allow readers to relate to the poem and what she has to say. The author uses diction or word choice such as “all together” and “altogether” in order to convey her message that hope and courage are an important aspect in order
Night Prompt #2 Many know of the victims of the Holocaust and how fragile they were, but not many know how the few that survived did so. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who was only fourteen when he arrived at Auschwitz, he talks about his life alongside his father who was the only family member he did not get separated from in the concentration camp. Eliezer explains how he overcomes the horrors he witnessed in order to survive and be freed.
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay, “Feet in Smoke” is a poignant glimpse at life, the human experience, and its frailty. “Feet in Smoke” focuses on an experience that John Jeremiah Sullivan’s brother, Worth, endured. Touching death. The essay utilizes imagery through vivid descriptions and “Feet in Smoke” has a particularly powerful paragraph that uses robotic imagery foremost. This paragraph, and the paragraphs that follow shortly afterwards are the crux of “Feet in Smoke”.
The poet successfully illustrates the magnitude with which this disease can change its victim’s perspective about things and situations once familiar to
Poetry is an effective means used to convey a variety of emotions, from grief, to love, to empathy. This form of text relies heavily on imagery and comparison to inflict the reader with the associated feelings. As such, is displayed within Stephen Dunn 's, aptly named poem, Empathy. Quite ironically, Dunn implores strong diction to string along his cohesive plot of a man seeing the world in an emphatic light. The text starts off by establishing the military background of the main protagonist, as he awaits a call from his lover in a hotel room.
Modern artists today generally use images of physical and mental illness in literature. In The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, both short stories show the usage of illness, madness, and fear. The narrators in both stories try to convince the readers that the characters are physically and mentally ill. Edgar Allen Poe creates these vivid characters which successfully assist the building of plot and ideas. Poe demonstrates how a person’s inner turmoil and terror can lead to insanity through illustrative language.
Before I began reading, I tried guessing what the story was about. Only knowing that the title was “Sweat”, I thought the story might be about sports or hard labor. Then I opened up the story and the first thing I noticed was that the author’s name was Zora Hurston. I only found out that the author was female once I saw “her” in the section below describing her life and writing career. I found out other important things such as she lived in Florida, she wrote during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s), she died impoverished, and her work was eventually found by the women’s movement.