Revised HE Lingwan HW 3
GE2115 LITERARY CRITIQUE 3
HE LINGWAN 52620468
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What Are We Talking When We Talk About Kitchen ?
———Kitchen as a symbol in American history and regional culture
This essay is going to discuss ‘kitchen’ and ‘fingers’ as two signs appearing in the three texts that are THAT EVENING SUN (south ,1931), TWO KINDS (west,1989) and SNOW (mid west,1998).
Attributed to the change of kitchen's function in historical process and geographical features, the signified communicating mode within family members transforms correspondingly. Fingers, as another kind of language, serve as a method to appeal communication with the outside world.
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Kitchen, an indispensable part of a house, seems to play an increasingly important role in literature.
In 1931’s novel THAT EVENING SUN, black women were doing humble work as maids in the white’s house. Kitchen here is a place where the maidservant eat her meal alone after the family finish theirs. On the contrary to its ideal image as a warm, busy and cheerful place, the kitchen is cold and dim. Coming to late 1980s and 1990s, in TWO KINDS and SNOW, kitchen becomes a place for mother to educate and get report from her children, which implies that the communication in a family changes with time.
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In THAT EVENING SUN, the hostess of the house would rather ask her child to have a look at the kitchen and report the situation to her, instead of doing that in her own. This reveals her superiority that kitchen is a symbol of inferior place where only black maids stay. In contrast, the kids often play with maids alone in the kitchen without any company of their parents, which signifies a superior and subordinates relationship between mother and kids, and a lack of communications in family as well. Though such a relationship keeps still in the other two texts, the communicating mode has slightly changed.
!
In TWO KINDS,the story happened in the West where lived many Asian immigrants who are used to chatting with each other when
HE LINGWAN 52620468
!
What Are We Talking When We Talk About Kitchen ?
———Kitchen as a symbol in American history and regional culture
This essay is going to discuss ‘kitchen’ and ‘fingers’ as two signs appearing in the three texts that are THAT EVENING SUN (south ,1931), TWO KINDS (west,1989) and SNOW (mid west,1998).
Attributed to the change of kitchen's function in historical process and geographical features, the signified communicating mode within family members transforms correspondingly. Fingers, as another kind of language, serve as a method to appeal communication with the outside world.
!
Kitchen, an indispensable part of a house, seems to play an increasingly important role in literature.
In 1931’s novel THAT EVENING SUN, black women were doing humble work as maids in the white’s house. Kitchen here is a place where the maidservant eat her meal alone after the family finish theirs. On the contrary to its ideal image as a warm, busy and cheerful place, the kitchen is cold and dim. Coming to late 1980s and 1990s, in TWO KINDS and SNOW, kitchen becomes a place for mother to educate and get report from her children, which implies that the communication in a family changes with time.
!
In THAT EVENING SUN, the hostess of the house would rather ask her child to have a look at the kitchen and report the situation to her, instead of doing that in her own. This reveals her superiority that kitchen is a symbol of inferior place where only black maids stay. In contrast, the kids often play with maids alone in the kitchen without any company of their parents, which signifies a superior and subordinates relationship between mother and kids, and a lack of communications in family as well. Though such a relationship keeps still in the other two texts, the communicating mode has slightly changed.
!
In TWO KINDS,the story happened in the West where lived many Asian immigrants who are used to chatting with each other when