Unit 1.pdf - Southwest High School

A Symbolic Perception of Self
Activity
1.10
SUGGESTED Learning Strategies: Visualizing, Brainstorming,
Marking the Text, Think-Pair-Share, Drafting, Self-Editing/Peer Editing
N o v e l
My Notes
© 2011 College Board. All rights reserved.
A b o u t t h e A u t h o r
Born in the Chicago barrio in 1954, Cisneros was the
only daughter in a family of seven children. Although
she was expected to assume a traditional female role in
her patriarchal, Mexican-American household, Cisneros
successfully struggled to articulate the experience of a
Latina woman, publishing the poetry collection Bad Boys
(1980) and then gaining international acclaim with her
first work of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1983).
A graduate of Loyola University and the University of Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, Cisneros has received fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
MacArthur Foundation.
The following passage is a vignette from The House on Mango Street.
by Sandra Cisneros
They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who
understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows
like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. Four raggedy excuses
planted by the city. From our room we can hear them, but Nenny just sleeps
and doesn’t appreciate these things.
Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground.
They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy
toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how
they keep.
Let one forget his reason for being, they’d all droop like tulips in a glass,
each with their arms around the other. Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I
sleep. They teach.
When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny
thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing
left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach
and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be.
Literary terms
A vignette is a brief visual or
written descriptive literary
sketch.
&
Grammar Usage
For many years you have
studied the difference
between complete
sentences and sentence
fragments. The accidental
sentence fragment usually
creates problems for the
reader because such
a fragment is missing
an important element.
However, good writers
may use sentence
fragments rhetorically,
to create effective, even
eloquent, phrasing. Notice
the sentence fragments
beginning with the
word “Four” in the first
paragraph of this passage.
These fragments also
demonstrate effective
use of parallel structure,
repeating the same form
or structure to express
an idea.
Unit 1 • Perception Is Everything 29