Alzaldua Response

SUMMARY:

In Alzaldua's article "Tlilli Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink", she talks about how she became a writer and her process of writing. She is a Hispanic female author and talks about how she has to find herself in her work, and how it controls her life. She talks about how to be writer you have to trust yourself. She gives very descriptive examples of how she writes and reviews and so forth through her writing process.

SYNTHESIS:

I can connect her article to several other articles we have read. LaMott with "Shitty First Drafts" and how Gloria states, "When I don't write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill." Which is similar to the way that LaMott says she has to let herself have a tantrum all over a paper just to get everything out before revising. She is also similar to Villanueva and Smitherman, based on her ethnicity and her writing. And also similar to Cixous because she uses her gender to give her writing more depth. 

DIALECTICAL NOTEBOOK:

RESPONSE:	QUOTE:
I think that this is very interesting how one thing can make her whole life change and she becomes a writer because of late night stories to her sister.	It must have been then that I decided to put stories on paper. 220
She talks about how when she needs to write and get all her thoughts down on paper she has no control over how they flow out onto the paper but later she can revise and organize them to fit together the way she wants.	The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. 220
She makes a comparison between her writing and a person. Giving examples of needing to be fed to grow and be nurtured into becoming something more.	The work manifests the same needs as a person, it needs to be "fed", la tengo que banar y vesir. 221
When she revises she concentrates on specific words and lets them simmer in her mind until they become something else and they have evolved into a deeper meaning.	I choose words, images, and body sensations and animate them to impress them on my consciousness, thereby making changes in my belief system and reprogramming my consciousness. 223

THOUGHTS: 

I really enjoyed Alzaldua's article. I loved the way that she started it, by talking about how she began telling her sisters stories at night and that led to her becoming a writer. I think that she was very similar to LaMott with the way she describes how she has a physical need to write, that it is her calling in life, that she depends on it to keep her sanity. I enjoyed Lunsford's article as well. I really liked the interview  with Alzaldua, it gave me more background and a better understanding of her style and other works. I can connect with her on how much writing means to us both, how sometimes we need to just get thoughts out of our head and watch them expand. 

Cixous Response

Terms & Definition:

whiteness: (noun) 1. the quality or state of being white 2. paleness 3. purity 4. a white substance
marginalized: (verb) To place in a position of marginal importance, influence, or power.
heterotypical: (adjective) of or pertaining to the first or reproductional division in melosis.
(Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/)
whiteness: a color like that of snow, milk, or bone.
marginalized: to treat someone or something as if they are not important.

(Cambridge Dictionary Online dictionary.cambridge.org)

heterotypical: different in kind, arrangement, or form. 

(Merriam-Webster www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary) 

Response:
These terms are misused and swept under the rug often when they are being used in an accusing manner. We try to pretend that people are not facing these issues in today's society, but they are still a problem. Individuals are marginalized based on their whiteness and if they are heterotypical. In Sociology, we have the wheel of institutions and it is broken up into different categories and based on nearly every aspect of your life you are judged, classified and defined by the institutions  It takes a long time for societies to change and learn to accept people as they are. However with institutions they change in a domino effect, one influences change in another and so on.

Dialectical Notebook:

Responses:	Quote:
This reminds me of Beger's article where he talks about how women are so aware of themselves, yet they are not verbally instructed how to become or how to do things differently.	But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a females sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes- any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. pg 247
Cixous sounds like she's giving a speech here, she makes valid points about repression and not being given a chance, but she also confuses the reader.	We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies- we are black and we are beautiful. pg 248
This makes me think of gender roles and how women have traits they must follow to be a norm in society.	She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. pg 250
This quote makes us realize that nothing can stop us or hold us back. We only think that we can not do something, when in reality we can do anything.	The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable.- It is still unexplored only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. 253
I liked this quote because it gives a very detailed example of how women are forced to go in after what they want and fight for a place in the world of writing.	If woman has always functioned "within" the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier diminishes   or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this "within", to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. pg 255