Rhetorical Analysis Of Elizabeth Bishop 's One Art

When referring to writing, tone is described as the writer’s attitude toward their subject matter and audience. To analyze any literary essay, recognizing tone is vital to understanding how the writer feels about the subject he has written about but also the underlying message he is trying to convey. In the essay written by the investigative reporter Jessica Mitford entitled, “To Bid the World Farewell” Tone is very pronounced and effective in getting the main point of the essay across. The author uses many different tones, from which I have selected three to analyze. All three off them use the good principles of writing a convincing and informative essay. Her ability to sarcastically familiarize the general public with the ‘dark arts’ of the embalming industry is both suggestive and engaging. She also uses an abundance of euphemisms, hiding the disturbing truth under a string of organized connotations. Her last method of tone is to inform the reader of the embalming methods by explaining with the wordy and often misunderstood colloqialisms of an actual ‘dermasurgeon’, in which she provides multiple quotes to further convince the reader.

Although England faces the menace of the impending Spanish invasion, Queen Elizabeth I reassures her troops that if they commit themselves to the British cause England will be victorious over the Spanish, therefore she incentivises her troops with the promise of honor, glory and wealth. Her purpose is to convince her troops to risk their lives for the safety of England. She accomplishes this by persistent use of parallelism and appeals to ethos.

In the passage, The Horizontal World, Debra Marquart states, “Driving west from Fargo on I–94, the freeway that cuts through the state of North Dakota, you’ll encounter a road so lonely, treeless, and devoid of rises and curves in places that it will feel like one long-held pedal steel guitar note” (Marquart 1). Debra Marquart, along with several others, share a great passion for the Midwest. The Midwest is an area that is truly full of the unknown, as much of its qualities are not known to society. The Midwest can easily be viewed as bland and insipid, yet also overly structured and undisclosed. It can be exceptionally difficult for one to fully understand the Midwest due to its size and variation. Although, all in all, it most certainly can be described as an area, whose positives are not know by all. In Debra Marquart’s writing, The Horizontal World, she utilizes comical satires and evident allusion to characterize the land of the upper Midwest.

In her memoir, Virginia Woolf discusses a valuable lesson learned during her childhood fishing trips in Cornwall, England. To convey the significance of past moments, Woolf incorporates detailed figurative language and a variety of syntax into her writing. Woolf communicates an appreciative tone of the past to the audience, emphasizing its lasting impact on her life.

Jane Addams’ speech explains her stance of George Washington's legacy as a soldier, statesman, and a Virginia planter. In this speech, Jane Addams references George Washington’s accomplishments in his past, including how things would be if he is to be present today. The most significant uses of rhetorical devices in this speech include hypophora, rhetorical questions, enumeratio, distinctio, and metaphors.

Freedom of thinking, a different way of seeing things can be hard for some. In George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, the Inquisitor gives a powerful speech, which demonizes Joan and her heresy. The Inquisitor uses his speech to persuade the church of Joan of the arc’s heresy. In his entreaty, he uses many rhetorical strategies such as ethos, pathos, and logos. He even uses similes and analogies to make his case. The Inquisitor keeps an intense and serious tone throughout the speech, while the situation being a grave one. He makes the plea a dying matter as if Joan killed someone.

On July 22, 1905, Florence Kelley, a United States social worker and reformer, delivered a speech before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Disgusted by the sweatshop conditions children had to endure, Kelley worked diligently to pull for child labor laws. Her brilliant rhetorical approach is to stop the unjust treatment of children through the enfranchisement of women. To convince the members of the convention, Kelley implements repetition and vivid imagery to persuade the mothers and the teachers in the crowd to urge the working men to help aid their cause.

Virginia Woolf, an avid woman novelist of the early twentieth century, faced many difficulties on her journey to becoming a successful writer. In her speech, which she delivers to the National Society for Women’s Service, she recounts her experiences as both a newly acquainted journalist and already established professional, all while giving detailed accounts of her struggles with the ghosts of oppression. These personal experiences not only help to establish and defend her credibility, they also serve as a means of developing her perspective on women’s functionality in successful careers. In addition, Woolf utilizes various rhetorical devices, such as the extended metaphor and parallelism, to portray the constant struggles of women in the workforce. She attempts to shed light on what obstructs all social advancement for women – the Victorian ideal of femininity – while encouraging her audience to confront this internal obstacle. Though she intended for her speech to be advice for women in any and all professions who are facing their own internal battles against oppression, Woolf insists her story is only one of many that have yet to be told.

Since the dawn of time, men have always been deemed the superior race. Men were leader and kings. They were always more educated and held better-paying jobs. In the United States, the dominant group is white protestant males. Whenever, women or young children, especially young girls, try to rise up, they have been shot done. The tides have been changing, though, with more women standing up for equality and their constitutional rights. Where would women be without outspoken women like Susan B. Anthony or Florence Kelley. Florence Kelley, who was a United States Social worker and reformer, delivered a speech before the conventions of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, that presents the argument against unjust labor laws for women and children, using rhetorical devices that drives her message home.

Florence Kelley was a social worker in the United States who fought against child labor laws and improving women’s working conditions. She delivered a speech on July 22, 1905 to the National American Women Suffrage Association. Florence Kelley use very powerful ways of persuasion during her speech. Kelley doesn’t believe that women and children are receiving the rights they should be given.

The mastery of rhetoric sets prominent leaders apart from ordinary people. The ruler of England, Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), shows this powerful trait through her leadership of England, bringing it to a golden age within 45 years despite being a woman. She delivered the “Speech to the Troops at Tilbury” with the intent to eradicate any form of treachery residing in the army, as well as to warn the soldiers of an imminent attack from King Philip II of Spain. Fortunately for England, the threatening Spanish Armada never reached the shores of Britain. Her clever use of rhetorical strategies such as ethos and pathos animates the soldiers to fight until their last breath for England.

There is no doubt in the fact that Mrs Elliot felt the need to present such a spirited speech to inform us that technology such as "modification of genome" are revolutionizing the traditional way of having an offspring as nature intended . The clever use of overstatements such as "generating outrage in the world" achieve the attention of spectators and arouse strong extreme emotional response, positioning the audience to visualise what it would be like to have a World War III due to some engineering of babies. The use of multiple rhetorical questions such as: "would you want a child to suffer a debilitating illness, or, selfishly endure yourself the pain and responsibility?", provokes feelings and position listeners to react emotionally, before

“Without thinking at all/I was my foolish aunt.”(48-49) , In “One Art” Elizabeth compares herself to her aunt. When her aunt cried out from the dentist office she felt her as a fullish women, but because she is reacting In a similar way to the magazine, she compares her aunts foolishness to her own. It was an unexpected realization that her reactions connected her to her aunt in a way she never felt before in her six years. “Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster/of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.”(48-49), The speaker wants to show us that theres nothing you can do but to accept you will lose things and to not let it get to you. In the poem her losses begin as insignificant objects that can be replaced but then she escalates her poem by significant losses like people, places, and homes. Its as if shes telling you to accept it, but she implicitly is showing us that shes not over her losses. She wants everyone to believe shes fine but we as the readers are not buying it.

The use of irony in the novel also contributes to its postmodernism. Many postmodernists treat serious subjects jovially to distance themselves from the difficult subject. They evoke black humor and different types of irony to offer critics of society and to display how society should not fear dark and somber things. DeLillo sprinkles irony all throughout his story using it even at the most serious of times. He uses it to show how the characters should not fear death and how the characters ignore danger when “the smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire” (8) and they did nothing about the possible imminent danger. DeLillo also uses irony to mock certain characters and expose the ridiculousness of certain beliefs and customs. When Jack’s boss advises him to change his name and appearance to gain more prestige, the change they make is pretentious as it is the same name only without one letter, “we finally agreed that I should event an extra initial and call myself J.A.K Gladney” (16). DeLillo continues to ridicule society and its principles by exposing absurdity such as Jack not knowing German despite being the founder of Hitler studies and his college requiring all Hitler majors to understand some of the language, “I had long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German” (31). The use of irony not only gives the novel a lighter tone, but also exposes DeLillo’s critique of society

Art is not life. More, it is a deception, mirroring experience and emotion, but never truly becoming that which it reflects. Art is attractive in that it is a controlled balance between rigid structure, which is too mundane for its purposes, and chaotic discord, which is too feral. Poetry is art. Loss is not. In her villanelle “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop proves this to be so. The poem itself is an emotive crescendo, and while its speaker struggles to hold the pain of loss within the confines of art, its readers note the incongruity of such an effort. One word prompts them, and fuels Bishop’s crescendo with a momentum, a tone, and a coda; “disaster” impels the poem “One Art.”