1.
Find at least one good quote in the essay and explain
why you find it important.
2.
Discuss how Zadie Smith has experienced
her development of “voice”.
3.
Look at the passage about Eliza (p.
135). Characterize her change of voice (note that you have an excerpt of Pygmalion in the compendium)
4.
Put the text into a Danish perspective - could the
text have been written by a Dane? If so, under which conditions? If not, why
not?
5.
Explain how Zadie Smith sees the
liminal/middling space of having multiple “voices” as strength. Provide textual
examples (you may use the passage on Obama on p. 136ff as a reference point).
6.
Come up with a question for the next
person to answer/discuss.
7.
Answer the question posted by the previous
student (if you’re first - well, it’s your lucky day ;))
I want you to discuss and comment on each other's points rather than just answering the questions. Keep in mind that this work replaces 4 English lessons and is to replace a written assignment. Make an effort!
I want you to discuss and comment on each other's points rather than just answering the questions. Keep in mind that this work replaces 4 English lessons and is to replace a written assignment. Make an effort!
Guys when did we get the compendium Language and power?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteJeg har fundet teksten online, men den fylder 9 tætskrevne sider, og kan se på Ludus at vi kun skal læse 3 sider. Er der nogen der vil skrive hvordan den første og sidste sætning af det vi skal læse lyder, så jeg kan finde frem til det?
ReplyDeleteDen første sætning er: Hello. This voice I speak with these days....
ReplyDeleteDen sidste sætning er: Even I want to be Barack Obama.
Håber du finder ud af det :D
Så siger jeg mange tak. Du er en sveske=)
Delete1.
ReplyDeleteThe quote I find most important is at page 134 in lines 3 – 8: This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose – now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both part of me. But how the culture warns against it!
The reason why I find it important is because it shows how people often only think about the future. If they do a particular thing or something specific happens everything will be better instead of living in the present moment. She wanted to be lettered but along the way she lost a part of her identity and culture. Now that she have achieved what she wanted she have lost something instead and she regrets. It shows that it really is important to think twice before wishing something and sometimes you actually already have what you want you just have to be grateful or you could loose it.
2.
Zadie Smith wanted a more lettered voice and believed that she could have two voices, one of her childhood she could use at home and one lettered voice she could use out in the big world. In the beginning it goes well because she still uses the childhood voice but I think along the way she gets so absorbed in the new voice and world so she forgets the old one. Suddenly she realize that she have forgotten her old voice and cannot have them both. I think she gets sad and regrets it because the old voice was a part of her identity and now without it she is missing a part of herself.
3.
Eliza does not change her voice because she wants to, like Zadie did, but is forced to because of a bet. Just like Zadie does Eliza loose her old voice and suddenly she feels like she does not belong anywhere because she has a formal voice in a low society or a poor background in a high society.
4.
I think the same could happen in Denmark because we also have different voices. We have different words and ways to say things in Denmark. A person from South Jutland talks differently than a person from North Jutland. If somebody moves from one part of Denmark to another I think that person eventually would change his or hers voice so it fits the new place.
5.
Zadie Smith sees the ability to have more than one voice as a gift because that person can relate and talk to many people. She thinks it gives a deeper level because that person does not only talk to people he or she can talk with all people which she says at page 136 in lines 33 – 34: This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them. Zadie Smith says that Barack Obama is kind of a chameleon because he can change his voice and talk with all people.
6.
Do you think a person’s voice is a big part of the identity? Why or why not?
7. My lucky day ;)
1. “Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle.”
ReplyDeleteI’ve chosen this quote because I think it shows how Zadie Smith feels about losing her “mother tongue”. I think she feels that the literary puddle confined her and her way of thinking. The colourful sea stands in contrast to the pond or puddle. I think she feels that the professional terminology make it all univocal and everyone speaks in the same “correct” way of the terminologies.
2. Thinking that she would not replace it but rather add a new one, Zadie Smith never intended to lose her childhood voice but found it that it was hard maintaining both these voices. As she thought that it was the tongue of the lettered people she absorbed the new voice. You think her naive for thinking, but isn’t this what we get thought in school? To talk this way, to use this terminology and to put the words in this particular way?
3. I’m going to have to disagree with Kirstine on this one. I don’t think she is forced to do anything, she just doesn’t feel that selling flowers on the corner Tottenham Court Road isn’t good enough for her but wants to be in a more wealthy florist. I think it is somewhat familiar to what Zadie Smith has experienced; they both change their “voice” to climb the social ladder and succeed in their respective job and education. Neither of them knew that taking on this new tongue would lead to losing their childhood voice. You could argue that there is a difference between the two as Smith does not think her “mother tongue” as less worthy than her new tongue.
4. I think it unlikely for something similar to be written by a Dane as I think that we in Denmark does not experience the same division in language. I think the Brits are more likely to feel this urge to show where in the UK they originate as they, throughout the history, have fought many battles e.g. against Scotland and Ireland. I think this divided the population back then and that some of this is still a very hot topic today. There is pride in showing where you’re from. The multi-ethnic society they have in the UK might also be contributing to this “war of tongues” as some might see prestige in being of English origin while others see pride in the exact opposite.
5.
“This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them”
You could say that Smith is almost awestruck by the many voices Obama is capable of reaching for from within, in her eyes he hasn’t been transformed from what he was to what he is today, he on the other hand has grown with what he was to where he is today (just like she thought she would add a voice rather than replace one when she left Willesden). Remembering the tongue of his youth and every path he met on his way to one day becoming the president with the actual voices of his people. “The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural “. Where many presidents before him had to assume a voice to reach voters, Obama need only look to a point in his life where he met with this and he is then capable of speaking with a true heart. Something Smith finds so incredible that it’s almost too good to be true “It is a disorienting talent in a president; we’re so unused to it. I have to pinch myself…”
6. I don’t think a person’s voice is a very big part of his or her identity, not in Denmark anyway. I don’t believe that people change personality just because the change our dialect. However I think that the voice is very important in other cultures such as the UK in order to show if you’re from, north, south, east or west .If you’re from a fine neighborhood or if you’re borne under the blue bells.
7. How come we Danes don’t feel the same need to show where we come from? We will rather try to hide our dialect rather than enhance it?
What are we supposed to do with the grammar, send it?
ReplyDeleteYup!
DeleteThis is silly, you can only post 4.096 characters so I can't post my stuff (sad panda face)...
ReplyDeleteAlexander Nielsen
Are you writing a novel?! :o
DeletePost i multiple posts then?=)And why are you up at 06:52 when you got the day off!=O
ReplyDelete1: The best quote in the text is in the very end. “Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.”
ReplyDeleteWhen people know you from spoken words, stories and alike then they start to from a picture of you in their head is someone you suddenly need to live up to. I have personally been insulted because people have heard something about me and started jumping to conclusions. Here in Obamas case I think it’s basically the same since we started to hear about Obama as the man that would “fix” America and all of a sudden he needs to stand infront of people, who suddenly expects more of him that he even does himself and therefore wants to be the Obama that is inside of the peoples head instead of the actual Obama.
2: At childhood she got her first voice most likely picked up from parents, friends and general area. She grew up with this voice and brought it out to the world. But with time she starts to develop a new voice. With time this new voice starts to absorb her childhood voice until that her old voice was but a memory. But when she lost this voice she also lost a part of herself and she was not capable of getting her old voice back. So now she feels like that something of her suddenly is missing.
3: Eliza change of voice is not something that happened but something she was forced to do unlike Zadie. Eliza voice change was needed to make her feel “welcome” in the society she now was part of.
4: This text could easily have been written by a Dane. Here I will draw from personal experience. I have family in Copenhagen, Randers and on Bonholm. On each visit in either Copenhagen or Bonholm I feel that the way that I talk is very different, even though I know that I’m welcome. There is a certain contrast in the way we talk in Copenhagen and Randers even in a land with no accent. But to answer the question yes a Dane could have written this text for example a person from Copenhagen that has to move to a little town in Jylland there would be a big difference in the way they speak.
5:
6: As a dane we have different dialects depending on where you are from. Do you see this as an important trait of a person?
7: I think that we try to hide it rather than enhance since that it really don’t have that much of an impact when speaking a different language.
1. Reading René’s excellent observation, I’ve chose a quote about Obama, to show that Zadie Smith doesn’t only have bad things to say about learning new voices; “The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral, it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural.” I think it shows very clearly that, despite the fact that Zadie Smith has issues about trading in one voice for another, she recognizes that learning to master a new voice, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to abandon the one that you already have.
ReplyDelete2. Not having maintained her childhood voice Zadie feels detached from her roots. I think blaming it only on a change in voice is a bit narrow. No doubt she feels that the voice is what makes the gap between her new self and what she comes from, but the gap has been built with more than grammar classes. Leaving one environment for another, changes a person in other ways than how he or she speaks. A person will adapt, when presented to a new set of rules of social behaviour, which is what happened to Zadie. I’m sure she could have listed a few more things of what she picked up in college that are more describing to her person than the taste for port. That being said, no doubt that the voice she has now is a problem when strolling through her old neighbourhood, trying to blend in. Her new voice is a barrier she think impenetrable, because she can’t hide it. There’s probably more to it than that though.
3. The change of Eliza is not only in her voice, but in her person. It’s a change in environment as I rambled on about a bit in my previous answer. A social climb if you will. We see that Eliza is very direct and straight forward in the first presentation, maybe even simple. After her transformation she not only speaks differently, but also reflects on a metaphor and uses it to drawn further conclusions. I think isolation is a big theme here. Eliza is being left on her own, after having been given a new set of values. She has no network in the environment she has been drawn into, and feels unable to identify with where she came from.
4. The issue of the text is universal in the way that language and social class goes hand in hand everywhere. The only thing that differs is the leap between classes. In Denmark many like to think that the leap isn’t there but it is. It may not be as significant as in many other places, and tolerance between classes may be bigger, but it is there none the less. I think it’s hard to say if the text could have been written by a Dane, but I imagine a middle aged homeless guy, suddenly deciding to go through university, becoming a political commentator, would recognize some of the points made. A bit extreme example maybe.
5. I think Kirstine and René have it covered pretty well. I refer to my answer on the first question for my view on it. I will add that I think Zadie gives voice too much credit for shaping ones identity, forgetting that voice does not change alone.
6. Why do you think Zadie Smith has not been able to keep her old voice like Obama has. Is it because of different skill sets in their characters or is it in the way they have learned new voices and how are they different?
7. I’m afraid I don’t agree with the premises for your question René. It is important to many Danes to show where they are from, using dialect. Coming from south, west, east or north, Danes are proud of their accents. At least a good amount of them are. If they are not, I think it’s because they are afraid to stand out in the crowd, afraid to be ridiculed.
1.
ReplyDelete“Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood.”
I find this quote important for several reasons. Firstly, it is the start of the essay. It marks one of the important subjects of the essay, the question of Sadie Smith’s different voices. It also addresses the debate, whether or not it is necessary to change who you are, and how the world perceives you, or if it is equally significant to maintain your roots. By mentioning the rounded vowels and consonants, she addresses the publicly common opinion that politicians are “above” the general public in the way they address themselves and in the way they talk. The quote ends when Sadie Smith says “this is not the voice of my childhood.” She hereby states that there is a difference in the way, she talks now and the way she talked as a child and possibly adolescent. She might be the same person in some ways, but her voice, however, is not.
2.
Zadie Smith thought that she needed a more lettered voice, if she were to be heard in the specific company. She believed that she could still maintain two different voices, the one of her childhood kept for the privacy of her own home, and a more lettered, accomplished voice, she could use in the public eye. At first she is able to keep up this parting of her voices, but as time goes on, she becomes accustomed to the voices of her new world, and she adapts herself, so that eventually she replaces the voice of her childhood with her new voice. One day she realizes that she has forgotten her childhood voice, and that there isn’t a possibility of keeping both voices, but that it’s a matter of choice. She ends up missing an important part of her childhood represented in her childhood voice, being left behind with only her new lettered voice.
3.
Eliza differs from Sadie, because she chooses to keep her voice unlike Sadie, but in the end is forced to change it any way when she loses a bet. She wants more of life than selling flowers on the Tottenham Court Road, and because of this wish, she ends up feeling unadjusted to both of her societies. She feels judged by her low social background in the high society, and she has only the high class voice to use amongst her former surroundings.
Just like Zadie does Eliza loose her old voice and suddenly she feels like she does not belong anywhere because she has a formal voice in a low society or a poor background in a high society.
- Minna Cakir
4.
ReplyDeleteI think, that this could have happened in Denmark as well. First of, there are different dialects in different parts of the country, and because of this, we speak in different tongues. We perceive eachother differently because of this, and in personal experience, I can say that we also change our dialects after the people, we are with. In my opinion, we all have different voices that match the different parts of our own small societies.
5.
In my opinion, Smith is very impressed by Obamas ability to juggle many different voices. She thinks, that Obama has been able to maintain the different voices formed in his life, and she respects the fact that he admits to this. He uses this knowledge to touch different parts of the population. “The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural “. He can be the man, USA needs, because he is aware that all people perceive in different tongues, and he can charm the population by using the different voices of his life.
6.
Would you personally choose to juggle different voices form different parts of your life, or to evolve your singular voice throughout your life, ending in one specific voice?
7. Why do you think Zadie Smith has not been able to keep her old voice like Obama has. Is it because of different skill sets in their characters or is it in the way they have learned new voices and how are they different?
I think she has not been aware in the same way, that she was making a choice. She thought it necessary to change her voice to adapt to the new circumstances of her life, to fit in, whereas Obama has been aware, that he has been moving through different social layers.
- Minna Cakir
I agree with Troels on his choice of qoutes. I shows that speaking in two tongues is not always a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteWhen Zadie Smith was a child she learn her first voice from her parents and her second voice she picked up in college. She regrets losing her childhood voice - they were both a part of her.
Kirstine and Troels has some great points on this one. Troels writes: "Leaving one environment for another, changes a person in other ways than how he or she speaks. A person will adapt, when presented to a new set of rules of social behaviour, which is what happened to Zadie." I can see that in my own life. I moved from Sønderborg to Randers and therefor left my Sønderjysk behind. I only talk ind my first tongue when I talk to my mother and littlesister, so just like Troels writes people will adapt to their surroundings.
In the end Eliza says: "Well, I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours". She has adated the language of the country she is in and Zadie sounds like she grew up and therefor "forgot" her first tongue.
I agree with my classmates on the point that this could have been written by a Dane aswell.
This is just what I wanted! You rock! I hope more students will come out to play :)
ReplyDelete1.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite quote has got to be “We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very soul”. It is the basic outline of the whole essay and a way of saying that duplicity is not really accepted in society. That’s why many newcomers lose their dialect completely.
2.
Well she explains it as a slowly progressing change. She always intended to learn this new voice of Cambridge because that felt natural to her, and that was a way of making it easier to connect with the Cambridge-people. But she had not imagined that she would lose her own Willesden accent because of that.
3.
It clear that for Eliza it is very unwanted to throw away her mother tongue. It’s actually forced upon her and she ends up being stuck in-between her old and new place – causing only confusion and a loss of everything she was.
4.
Of course it could have been written by a Dane too. My Dad spent his childhood years on Fyn and when we visit his brothers and sisters there’s a clear difference between how we talk and how they do. My dad was also laughed at a lot when he first came to Randers because of his (to them) funny accent. Also my sister was on an afterschool(?)(efterskole) just outside Copenhagen and it was very clear that she adapted very quickly because the accent was very thick and annoying every time she came home.
A new place requires adaption – some places requires more than other.
5.
Well I guess it has something to do with being believable. That’s at least how Obama is using it – he is using his past experiences to try and create the future.
6.
Do you believe that a change of voice can mean a change of personality?
7.
I don’t really have much of idea whether or not I would care about keeping my original voice throughout my life. If my life leads me to a place where I need to change voice in order to really establish myself then I’ll do it. It just seems so far away to loose what I have now.
- Janus Eden
Mikael
ReplyDelete1. Find at least one good quote in the essay and explain why you find it important.
-
``There’s no quicker way to insult an ex-pat Scotsman in London than to tell him he’s lost his accent``
The reason why I think this quote is so important is actually pretty well explained in the essay.
The quote is about whom you are and what an accent means to you, and to other people. When people use two voices, it’s because they are afraid of people judging them, and they try to fit in. A proud Scotsman love his country and would never change he’s accent to fit into, maybe the city of London.
2. Discuss how Zadie Smith has experienced her development of “voice”.
- Zadie smith experienced a really common thing. I believe that her development of her voice or `the voice` is something that happens to almost every one of us. When you’re young and naïve, and haven’t really experienced anything in your life. You have some opinions that you haven’t really based on the reality, and when reality hits you in the head, you have to change or do something or ells people maybe just ignore your opinions, when you have something to say.
3. Look at the passage about Eliza (p. 135). Characterize her change of voice (note that you have an excerpt of Pygmalion in the compendium)
- Her change of voice is really just the lost of herself. She is losing herself to the cooperation’s norms. Thru college education, you’re just being prepared to function in the society. You are being prepared to look, talk and write like everybody else, because that is what other people have told you to do. In the first example she wrote like we could see her character of person, and it was nice to see some feelings in the text. The second example didn’t show any feelings at all. The whole thing looked like a machine wrote it, and I think it was, because she is now a cooperate slave.
4. Put the text into a Danish perspective - could the text have been written by a Dane? If so, under which conditions? If not, why not?
- I have to say that I really don’t understand the question, if we are talking about people having two voices, then it wouldn’t matter which country you’re from, because you still have to adapt society and maybe lose your voice. If we have to look from maybe an election between two candidates running for something important, then again it wouldn’t matter, our government people here in Denmark are as tricky as they are in the US. They know how to speak to people.
5. Explain how Zadie Smith sees the liminal/middling space of having multiple “voices” as strength. Provide textual examples (you may use the passage on Obama on p. 136ff as a reference point).
- I’m really confused about what her opinion is about the multiple voices or maybe I haven’t read it right, but I don’t see it. I see the part of the text where they talk about the middling space, but I can’t see zadies opinion about it.
But for a logical reason, it could be that there is some situations where you need to speak with your second voice, to get rid of someone or something.
Its strength could in the perspective that you can control your surroundings.
Alexander:
ReplyDelete1. ”By the end of his experiment, Professor Higgins has made his Eliza an awkward, in-between thing, neither flower girl nor lady, with one voice lost and another gained, at the steep price of everything she was and everything she knows”
I think this quotation, which refers to the Eliza story, explains just how much our language means. The tongue we speak affects our identity. Without it we lose a bit of our soul, and thus our very person. Eliza ends up being lost in no-man’s land because she has lost her identity. Furthermore this loss of identity also affects her position in society; she ends up being “neither flower girl nor lady”. The tongue we speak is also a way to measure your class…
Alexander:
ReplyDelete2. Not sure how you want to discuss this. It is directly told in the text that she finds the loss of her mother tongue tragic and something which happened because she felt forced to “learn the voice of the lettered people” in order to be lettered. When she looks back now she points out the mistakes she made and that she only went to Cambridge out of cowardice and eagerness to please. She had an idea that she could maintain both tongues, and to start with it worked out fine but her mother tongue slowly vanished.
It can be discussed why she lost her language though. She mentions cowardice and eagerness to please, so perhaps it is mainly due to wanting to fit in and not stand out from the rest. In other words she may be afraid of being different so she could have been caught up in all the “Cambridge posher pond”.
Alexander:
ReplyDelete4. With a bit of a different perspective the language actually is a problem in Denmark. As I mentioned earlier, language is something that defines your status in society and also your identity. What we see these days during educations in Denmark is that there are certain pattern breakers who break away from their parrents’ underclass status because they develop a new language in the school. This new language differentiates from the parrents’ and creates barriers between child and parent. The school teaches the children a “new language” in order to make them lettered, and this affects their identity and ability to communicate with people who do not have the same knowledge.
A more boring way to answer this question is that just like English, we have different dialects around the country, and perhaps if you were to be living among people with a different dialect for a while, yours might change a bit. But in my opinion, the dialects we have in Denmark do not differentiate too much and therefore will not be a major identity change.
5. Whereas Zadie Smith was not able to keep multiple voices, Obama is, and this is something she really admires him for. She illustrates with the Obama scene (P 137 l. 3-12) that Obama has not let his voices consume his very person, there are still the same characteristics in him that he had as an adolescent. As Zadie smith put it when she had 2 voices “I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing […] but flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained”, and what Obama is able to do is to maintain this flexibility, and even add to it “The tale he tells is all about addition”. This addition is something Zadie Smith sees as a great strength, it is something that creates a “reflective quality” in Obama’s person which makes voters see in him what they want to see.
Alexander - AGAIN:
ReplyDelete6. Uhmmmmmm, I am so bad at this… Although the question did not mention anything about the question being text related!
Are you looking forward to the coming holiday?
7. As you already pointed out (René), class and identity is much more related to the English language compared to the Danish one, it is much more important to show where you come from in the UK, and that is probably mainly due to the interior conflicts over the time in the UK, you have Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the so-called “countries within a country”. This makes it important to
reveal your voice and thus show where you are from and thus present your identity and class. The lack of conflicts in Denmark is what probably prevents us from having or wanting to show different dialects.
Søren:
ReplyDeleteZadie Smith is given a lecture in the New York Public Library in December 2008.
She starts by saying that the language she speaks is not the language she spoke in her childhood.
She picked up her new language in collage. She assumed that the new language was the language spoken by lettered people and therefore, she just ran with it lacking the strength to stand firm.
Zadie Smith is not very proud that she have picked up a new voice, and made it her own. “This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose- now it’s my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it” it’s obvious the Zadie smith didn’t just want a single voice, she regret that she can’t still talk in her mother-tongue, or not that she can’t but she simple choose not to.
Zadie Smith gives an example by telling a Shaw story, a girl, Eliza, who is looking for help to change her voice, she wants to be a lady, as well as a flower girl. But neither seems to work out for her, even though she actually changes her voice. Shaw is good at speaking in tongues, he had a good ear for it. Unfortunately he was not able to transfer these powers to Eliza, who would most likely have loved them.
We must be careful because if we change too much, we might end up losing ourselves, changing language, then religion, culture and so on. In the end 1 language has to be sacrificed making room for the new one.
Barak Obama, the president of the Unites States, has an incredible gift when it comes to speaking in tongues. “The new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them” at seventeen he wrote a comic novel, which at first seemed extremely racist toward girls of all kind, but if you look deeper, you catch the great deal of humor and sarcasm. He takes the form of many-voiced men. Or maybe he actually takes the form of fathers passing the word from father to son. The novel has a very masculine point of view.
It’s clear that picking another language is bad, we must be care full not to lose ourselves and our identity. Also changing a language is bad, too much slang and borrowed words can help destroying a language, and In fact you should always love your mother-tongue and not try to alter it in any way. But would it be so bad if everyone on the earth spoke the same language? A lot of things would be easier, if all of us spoke the same language, many wars and disagreements could be prevented. The internet and globalization pushes us into speaking the same language, uniting us, making global work easier and more attracting. If we like it or not there is a storm coming, “work together or work alone” do we want to be a part of a new and united world, or do we want to keep out identity our national pride our ability to be different. It’s hard to know what side to take, and I for one am not ready to make that decision.
Casper Skovgaard:
ReplyDelete1. Find at least one good quote in the essay and explain why you find it important.
”… we are sure, between worlds, ideas, cultures, voices – whatever will become of them? Something’s got to give – one voice must be sacrificed for the other”
This is, perhaps, one of the best quotes in the text. Because Zadie means that, everything most got to give, for something else to take place. We can’t have to voices in our life’s, as well, as we can’t have to cultures, world’s and ideas – we can not run from who we are and our social heritage.
2. Discuss how Zadie Smith has experienced her development of “voice”
I the beginning she seemed fine with her new voice, as she began on Cambridge, but Zadie began to realize that, she was; “adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way.” Zadie finds it hard, because the new voice, is not who she is, some quotes which explains it; “Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular” – “We feel that our voices are who we are”
3. Look at the passage about Eliza (p. 135). Characterize her change of voice (note that you have an excerpt of Pygmalion in the compendium)
Her language changes from informal to formal, and also her personality changes.
4. Put the text into a Danish perspective - could a Dane have written the text? If so, under which conditions? If not, why not?
We, Danes, speak in a lot of different kinds of accents, so off course a Dane could have written it. The conditions could be, a person from south Jutland moves to Copenhagen to study. The person from Jutland wouldn’t fit in, because of the accent – so the person must change the way he speaks, when he is in Copenhagen and the way he speaks when he is home.
5. Explain how Zadie Smith sees the liminal/middling space of having multiple “voices” as strength. Provide textual examples (you may use the passage on Obama on p. 136ff as a reference point).
That could be a strength. Especially, provided for an American President. Obama need to address everyone in the society, so having multiple, one for the upper-class society, and one for the middle and lower-class society. Zadie means that; “The new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them” Obama have ability to speak for them, but he is speaking with them.