Jamaica KIncaid- Girl

A detailed Summary of Jamaica KIncaid- Girl

The poem "Girl" by author Jamaica Kincaid shows love and family togetherness by creating microcosmic images of Western Caribbean familial practices and imbedding them in a seemingly incomprehensible text. Upon closer examination, the reader sees that the text is a string of images that are the cultural practices and moral principles that a Caribbean woman is passing along to her young daughter. Jamaica Kincaid has taken common advice that daughters are constantly hearing from their mothers and tied them into a series of commands that a mother uses to prevent her daughter from turning into "the slut that she is so bent on becoming" (23). But they are more than commands; the phrases are a mother's way of insuring that her daughter has the tools that she needs to survive as an adult. The fact that the mother takes the time to train the daughter in the proper ways for a lady to act in their culture is indicative of their familial love; the fact that there are so many rules and moral principles that are being passed to the daughter indicates that mother and daughter spend a lot of time together. The reader gets the impression that the advice that the mother gives her daughter has been passed down from many

The incorporation of Reader Response criticism into an excellent personal critical style is one of the most important concepts. Reader Response gives the reader the latitude to read and interpret a text without the artificial constraints of deconstruction or New Criticism. Factors both inside and outside of the text can be interpreted by the reader in order to understand the text. If a 60-year old man reads "Girl," he would have a different reader response to the story than a woman half his age; yet under this form of criticism, both readers' interpretation of the text is valid because it is based on their subjective response to the story. In my opinion, the use of Biographical, Historical, and Reader Response criticism is the only way that a reader can analyze a story without losing his or her enjoyment of the reading experience. After all, the enjoyment of a literary work is the basic reason why people read in the first place. If an analysis has to be a chore or a nightmare of picking the text to pieces, then reading for enjoyment and for exposure to new cultures and ideas becomes an unpleasant burden. The Reader Response/Biographical/Historical critical technique is nothing more than a reader's chance to learn more from the text than what is written on the page.

An excellent personal critical style can be created by including elements from feminine criticism, biographical criticism, and reader response criticism. Since I took Literary Theory and Criticism with Dr. Jacobs I hae found that a combination of criticisms is the only way to comprehensively examine a text.

generations of women. The advice of the sages has ena

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Approximate Word count = 1111
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English