Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [65]
I found a lot more obvious echoes to Lincoln in this speech as compared to the victory speech, coupled with earth imagery—for example, “we cannot hallow this ground” (Lincoln) vs. “what the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted” (Obama). This ties America to the actual physical land. It romanticizes and makes permanent the ideas of our country—a nice setting behind all of the nation’s troubles—while simultaneously adding to the so-desired degree of “timelessness” of Obama’s first inaugural address.
You can sense the writer, Molly Harper, gathering steam here as she begins to make connections in her evidence, yet her rhetorical analysis seems to spring naturally from simple observation of Obama’s pronouns and then the significance of the contrast between them in the two speeches she is comparing.
Passage-based Focused Freewriting: Another Example
Below is an example of a student’s exploratory writing on an essay by the twentiethcentury African-American writer Langston Hughes. The piece is a twenty-minute reflection on two excerpts. Most notable about this piece, perhaps, is the sheer number of interesting ideas. That may be because the writer continually returns to the language of the original quotes for inspiration. She is not restricted by maintaining a single and consistent thread. It is interesting though, how as the freewrite progresses, a primary focus (on the second of her two quotes) seems to emerge.
Passages from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes
“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tomtom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious “white is best” runs through her mind…. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations—likewise almost everything else distinctly racial.”
“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay on the situation of the Negro artist in America sets up some interesting issues that are as relevant today as they were in Hughes’s time. Interestingly, the final sentence of the essay (“We build our temples…”) will be echoed some four decades later by the Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, but with a different spin on the idea of freedom. Hughes writes “we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” King says, “Free at last, free at last, my God almighty, we’re free at last.” King asserts an opening out into the world—a freeing of black people, finally, from slavery and then another century of oppression.
Hughes speaks of blacks in a more isolated position—”on top of the mountain” and “within ourselves.” Although the mountain may stand for a height from which the artist can speak, it is hard to be heard from the top of mountains. It is one thing to be free. It is another to be free within oneself. What does this phrase mean? If I am free within myself I am at least less vulnerable to those who would restrict me from without. I can live with their restrictions. Mine is an inner freedom. Does inner freedom empower artists? Perhaps it does. It may allow them to say what they want and not worry