Monster Story

Passage:

“he empties the land of these people, and then he empties the people, he just empties the people.”

-Identify two or three specific reasons why your choice is provocative or challenging, and how that provocation or challenge creates and sustains a tension in the text:

In my opinion, the above sentence is very critical and challenging part of Kincaid’s project. We notice that Kincaid is repeating the word empties. The whole passage but particularly this specific sentence is an “informal” way of writing and thus we can say that Kincaid exposes herself to us. She allows herself to be criticized by the readers, who are constantly inclined to judge and sneer at her reactions and comments. She is sharing, and the readers are listening. Her indifference to detail, her personal removal from history and her inability to see past simplicity reveals her tension between reasonable expectation and the unexpected. Her way of expressing things makes the reader uncertain for the context which is obviously a challenge to the norms of high-level writing.

-Brainstorm about the ways in which the provocation or challenge that you have chosen informs or extends your understanding of the writer's project and how the writer's project informs or extends the provocation or challenge:

My understanding of Kincaid’s project is that Kincaid is trying to write and express her feelings, thoughts and opinions in the simplest way possible so that the reader is able to have an opinion. She is stating thesis statements in the text. By that, she makes an assertion about Christopher Columbus and how his actions lead to the world that we live today (names, places, history) and predicts how the topic will be developed. She doesn’t simply announce the topic, but she makes a promise to the reader about the scope, purpose, and direction of the text and lets the imagination to float and wonder.

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