[4.6.34] Applying Critical Lenses to a New York Times article
Part 1: Read the attached article from the New York Times.
Texas Way Station Offers a First Serving of Hope (Sunday, September 5, 2005). By Dan Barry. Section A, Page 9, Column 1
REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES ©
ORANGE, Tex., Sept. 4 - One after another, the westward-bound buses pull off Interstate 10 and all but collapse at the Texas Travel Information Center here. Their doors sigh open to release the fetid smell of a devastated New Orleans: of urine and waste and mud; of days spent on rooftops, on bridge overpasses, in dark and dangerous concrete behemoths.
If despair carried an odor, it would be this.
The future for the dazed evacuees inside is so uncertain that they do not even know where their buses are headed, other than to a shelter somewhere, maybe Beaumont, maybe Dallas. So many have streamed into this state, more than 220,000, that Gov. Rick Perry - who delivered an Emma Lazarus-like vow last week to take in the huddled masses of Hurricane Katrina - now says the state's shelters are near capacity.
Still, the manifestation of the governor's offer continues here at this state-line tourist center, which the Red Cross and local volunteers have transformed into an off-ramp haven, where food is dispensed, hugs are shared and harrowing words are released into the muggy Texas air. The ground here is dry, and firm.
The tourist center, with its massive Lone Star sculpture that is set aglow at night, is the first stop in Texas for those leaving, or fleeing, Louisiana. Among the many destinations it promotes is this small city, population 19,000. Visit the Orleck, a destroyer built here in 1945. Stop at the old-fashioned Farmers' Mercantile general store. Don't forget the International Gumbo Cook-Off, always the first weekend in May.
All that has been set aside for a more immediate form of hospitality. Forty-one lavatories line the "Pet Rest Area." Boxes of donated clothes and a humming Emergency Medical Services truck take up several parking spots. Volunteers from the Red Cross and local churches stand ready to hand out snacks, fruit and drinks - often the first food that many evacuees have had in nearly a week.
Then the word goes out again: "Here comes another one."
A bus door opens, and New Orleans stumbles out, gasping, weeping.
Thursday blurred into Friday, and now Friday had become Saturday night. Scenes that could have been lifted from "The Grapes of Wrath," or maybe the Book of Exodus, continued to play out in a tourist-center theater, amid air permeated by bus exhaust.
Over here, a mud-spattered 1996 Ford pickup, fresh from New Orleans some 240 miles away, with three men in the cab and three on the flatbed, alongside plastic bags of salvaged belongings. They were headed for Houston because one had a distant relation there. After that, who knows, said the driver, Alvaro Fuentes, as he ate free chips.
Over there, sprawled across the front seat of a foul-smelling Buick station wagon, Bobby Glover, 71, diabetic, and crying. He had spent several days on a roof in Waveland, Miss. "Just beat him if he doesn't straighten up," joked his wife, Sarah, to lighten the heavy moment.
Out of yet another bus stepped a young woman who could not stop sobbing. Her two small boys, charged with late-night, pent-up exuberance, tugged at her arms, while her husband conveyed no sign of comprehension. They had just been told they were bound for a shelter in a place called Deweyville.
"It's awesome out there," Rose Thayer, a volunteer from the First Presbyterian Church, assured them. "It's a nice place. And the kids are going to do wonderful in the school."
As the woman wandered off, no doubt trying to conjure a place called Deweyville, Ms. Thayer and other volunteers said that the story was one of too many that they have heard at the tourist center in recent nights. "We were the first food, the first clothing, the first everything," she said.
The first to see the dehydrated babies, who were immediately given Pedialyte. The first to hear about the children and grandparents who were put on earlier buses, and now were somewhere unknown in this Lone Star State. The first to be shown photographs of what evacuees said were dogs tugging at corpses.
These stories and images will linger in Orange long after the buses have gone, long after the hundreds of evacuees have left the shelters in its churches and the pastors can take down the hand-scrawled signs about curfews and computers set aside for "help locating loved ones."
It was nearly midnight when another bus pulled into the tourist center. The driver, Greg Bruce, a volunteer from Tallahassee, Fla., accepted a cup of orange soda and explained the odyssey of his day.
Mr. Bruce said that he drove the streets of New Orleans before being directed by soldiers to a bridge where hundreds of people had spent days without help. The people filed on board, 57 in all, filling his bus with that smell. They rode in silence, he said, though they asked to listen to the news on the radio because they had been cut off from the rest of the world for so long.
Now, at this rest stop, Mr. Bruce watched his passengers shuffle along the food line, accepting plastic bags filled with food and drink. "This is the first food they've had," he said. "This is it."
Two of his passengers huddled a few feet away: Shirley Jones Williams, 50, and her husband, Michael, 53, a laborer who looked as if he could not lift a hammer. He said they had been stranded at the South Claiborne Overpass for four days, he in boots, she in just socks.
"That's why my feet are swollen," Mrs. Williams said, sobbing. "No clothes, no nothing. Everything floating in the water."
She asked the world to know that they were looking for their daughter, Takeba Crosby, and her husband and daughter - "my grandbaby," she said. The family had lived next door to them in the Ninth Ward, but fled days ago - maybe to Texas.
Mrs. Williams boarded the bus, still with no shoes, followed by her bent husband. Mr. Bruce, the bus driver, called out: "All right! Let's go, let's go, let's go!"
Where to?
"I'm taking them to Houston," he said. "From there they'll probably be transferred to someplace else."
The door closed with a hush. The bus pulled out of the tourist center and back onto Interstate 10 darkness.
Within a half-mile it passed a sign that flashed a disheartening message from Houston: "ASTRODOME SHELTER CLOSED - I-45 TO DALLAS."
Margaret Toal contributed reporting for this article.
Part 2: From a New Critical position, examine the writer’s use of language. Choose 3 short passages you find particularly effective and underline them on your article.
Passage 1 (Write first 4 words here):
Reason:
Technique:
Passage 2 (Write first 4 words here):
Reason:
Technique:
Passage 3 (Write first 4 words here):
Reason:
Technique:
Example: “So many have streamed into this state, more than 220,000, that Gov. Rick Perry—who delivered an Emma Lazarus-like vow last week to take in the huddled masses of Hurricane Katrina—now says the state’s shelters are near capacity.”
Reason: The effectiveness of the passage comes from the allusion to Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem “The New Colossus” which gives the statue of liberty the following words: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” (10-12).
This reference emphasizes the bleak irony that the statue of liberty symbolizes the nation’s willingness to welcome the “wretched refuse” of the world, but in fact, failed to assist the “wretched refuse” of its own people.
The vivid language “streamed into this state” (vivid verb, alliteration), “vow” which connoted a near holy promise, onomatopoeia of “streamed” “state” “state’s” “shelters” emphasizes the continual, serpentine, ……
Techniques: allusion, vivid verbs, alliteration, connotation
Part 3: Looking at the lenses we have available, choose two you and your classmates believe will help you extend your understanding of this text. Choose from Archetypal, Feminist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Reader-response, Historical, Deconstruction or Structuralism.
Lens #1______________________________ Lens # 2__________________________
Summarize the definition of the lens (#1_______________) in your own words:
Choose two passages you believe are particularly helpful to examine from this critical perspective. Underline them in the text and indicate where they are below:
Discuss the reasons:
Looking at the article as a whole, write a statement synthesizing your understanding of the article from the perspective you have chosen.
Summarize the definition of the lens (#2_______________) in your own words:
Choose two passages you believe are particularly helpful to examine from this critical perspective. Underline them in the text and indicate where they are below:
Discuss the reasons:
Looking at the article as a whole, write a statement synthesizing your understanding of the article from the perspective you have chosen.
Part 4: Are there other perspectives you think would be helpful in understanding more about this article? List them here and explain briefly why you considered them:
The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus, 1883
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities fame. “
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she.
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost, to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
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