Daughters of the Dust and Mama Day :: Julie Dash Gloria Naylor Literature Essays

Daughters of the Dust and Mama Day Although their plots are divergent, Julie Dash’s â€Å"Daughters of the Dust† and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day possess strikingly similar elements: their setting in the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, their cantankerous-but-lovable matriarchs who are both traditional healers, and stories of migration, whether it be to the mainland or back home again. The themes of the film and the book are different but at the same time not dissimilar: Dash’s film emphasizes the importance of retaining connections to the ancestral past, while Naylor’s novel focuses more on love, loss, and reconciliation with the past that is part of the present and will continue into the future. Were Dash’s audience to return to the South Sea islands eighty years after â€Å"Daughters of the Dust† they might find the Gullah people and their lives similar to those of the Willow Springs of Naylor’s novel. Although nearly a century spans between them, these two people nevertheless share many traits. Many of the residents of Willow Springs answer to a nickname given them as a child; similarly, Viola Peazant reminisces about the nicknames given to children in Ibo Landing. Members of both communities, generations from Africa and steeped in â€Å"modernity,† still come to the traditional herbalist for help in matters of the body and spirit: Eula uses Nana’s medicine to contact the soul of her deceased mother; Bernice and Ambush come to Mama Day to heal Bernice when she becomes ill, and later for help in conceiving a child. Both Nana Peazant and Mama Day draw their knowledge from a life lived on their respective islands and their strength from their ancestors, whom they visit and tend at the village graveyards. And like Nana Peazant, Mama Day struggles to maintain a tie with her family members who have left the island and immersed themselves in the mainstream culture. Cocoa, however, is difficult to reconcile with just one character in â€Å"Daughters of the Dust.† Perhaps she is mostly like Yellow Mary, who has left Ibo Landing but returns in the â€Å"now† of the film. It is unclear, though, why Yellow Mary returns; unlike Cocoa, she is not in the habit of paying visits to her family, and she is hardly welcomed with the same enthusiasm as is Cocoa. Also, it seems that although both Mary and Cocoa share a closeness to their elder female relatives, Cocoa clashes more with Mama Day than Mary does with Nana.

Roland Barthes the Death of the Author

The Death of the Author In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: â€Å"It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling† Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?Is it the author Balzac, professing certain â€Å"literary† ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identi ty is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality – that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol – this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose â€Å"performance† may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his â€Å"genius† The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the â€Å"human per son† Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author's â€Å"person†The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, ost of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his â€Å"con fidence. â€Å"Though the Author's empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic ovelist – that point where language alone acts, â€Å"performs,† and not â€Å"oneself†: Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader. ) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme's theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rh etoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost â€Å"chance† nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer's inferiority seemed to him pure superstition.It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel – but, in fact, how old is he, and who is he? – wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he m akes his very life into a work for which his own book was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.Surrealism lastly – to remain on the level of this prehistory of modernity – surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes – an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be â€Å"played with†; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist â€Å"jolt†), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author.Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a â€Å"subject,† not a â€Å"person,† end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language â€Å"work,† that is, to exhaust it. The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real â€Å"alienation:' the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or – what is the same thing – the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same.The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book – that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representi ng, of â€Å"painting† (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the â€Å"pathos† of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly â€Å"elaborate† his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questio ns any origin. We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single â€Å"theological† meaning (the â€Å"message† of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal â€Å"thing† he claims to â€Å"translate† is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an expe rience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, â€Å"he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes† (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.Once the Author is gone, the claim to â€Å"decipher† a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then t ake as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is â€Å"explained:' the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even â€Å"new criticism†) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a ultiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, â€Å"threaded† (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a â€Å"secret:' that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.Let us return to Balzac's sentence: no one (that is, no â€Å"person†) utters it: its source, its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by â€Å"the tragic†); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator).In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader's rights. The reader ha s never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.

Credit Scores Helping Lenders Estimate Potential Risk Finance Essay - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 4 Words: 1248 Downloads: 5 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Statistics Essay Type Argumentative essay Did you like this example? Credit scores is a grading of an individuals ability to repay debts and arising financial obligations within a specific time limit; its an evaluation of a person or business credit worthiness. It a tool normally used by firms and business that engage in lending activities i.e. banks, mortgage firms, insurances firms and guarantors among others. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Credit Scores Helping Lenders Estimate Potential Risk Finance Essay" essay for you Create order Credit scores have enabled firms, business, banks and other lending institutions to have vital information regarding their customers creditworthiness and therefore enable them to determine the kind of loans to issue them and the level of interest that can be charged to each borrower, it also enables them to reduce risk that are associated to each of the borrower. Credit scores are normally prepared by the lenders or by independent agents on behave of persons, firms, business and various debt issues. I agree to the idea that credit scores are a fair measure that helps lenders estimate potential risk. Lenders use these scores in calculating the amount of risk that are imminent; they also use it to minimize the level of risk and do evaluate who is eligible for a loan and at what level of interest. Lenders are in an aim of maximizing profit, and for this objective to be achieved, it is dependent on the amount of funds that have been borrowed. Lenders now are faced with dilemma; they have to lend much to earn more, but this objective is subject to the potential risk from borrowers they he have to use credit scores to evaluate which among the customers can bring much revenue, the use of scores before allowing one assess loan is a way of minimizing risk. An important function of credit scores is ensuring that those who borrow loans have the ability to repay as it due and therefore evaluate the confidence level a lender has on the borrower. According to Kerr Duncan (2008) individuals credit worthiness can be known through various aspects including the stock exchange market, financial records and transactions between other players in the credit sector, it is then used in projection of ones behavior in the future. An individuals credit score is an outcome of the various successive independent evaluation of his or her ability to meet outstanding obligations within the set time; it considers borrowing and repayment records, assets and liabilities held by a business. Information is derived from ones history financially to forecast how the same individual is likely to replicate the same in future. It is noted credit scores of persons keep changing either to betterment or otherwise depending on ones economical situations. Credit scores has been a better tool in dealing with the risk faced by lenders, it provide a better solution to the future risk in that most lenders will be having records of every borrower and their scores. It enable lenders determine the appropriate loans and the corresponding interest rates that can be offered to a borrower. Borrowers with poor scores will be avoided or if they are accepted their interest rates shall be punitive to gather for the high risk associated with them. Borrowers can improve their credit scores by paying the arising obligation on loans on time, ensuring that credit balance on credit cards are low and paying off debt rather that shifting them between credit cards. If one always pays his debt obligation within the credit period then he or she is likely to have a favorable credit score. With a good credit score one is likely to have favors from lenders i.e. risk against the lenders will be that low and the borrower can have relatively low finance charges. If an individuals credit score is poor may be because he or she normally defaults or meet arising obligations late, he or she is more likely to have unfavorable terms of credit, to the lender the risk is high and more likely to place high finance charges or even deny the borrower fully. For the credit scores to be more effective tool, methodologies used in calculating needs to be clearly spelt out. It should be noted out that the main role of credit scores is to criticizes and provide useful financial information on individuals, businesses and corporations that can be used to predict the future defaults and therefore averts damage. Credit scores firms need to be flexible and fit to the changing independent market. Kerr (2008) has that independent credit firms must flex to avoid market turmoil, and that credit score firms should develop and use models that touches all the necessary variables making the score. Firms owe to use comprehensive models to ensure the cases of defaults are reduced significantly. To ensure that credit scores are effective credit score firms themselves need to be effective and relevant to the point; they owe to continuously reform themselves to be at par with the dynamic financial market and hence the need to review the methods of calculating credit scores. In order to ensure that credit rating firms are effective in their scores, they should be held liable and accountable to the lending institutions, they can either take the whole liability or to the extent to which they are liable. There are several ways of evaluating a credit score and one famous is FICO- initially called Fair Isaac Corporation. FICO is used by most lending firms to evaluate the possibility that a customer will default. Research as proved scores as predictive in dealing with risk and uncertainty of borrowers; it has shown that most credit consumers have gained from the lower finance cost from credit firms merely due to credit scores. Although there have been critics to the credit rating firms, they are playing an important role ensuring that lending institutions get the valued information. At times the firms developing the credit score use outdated models that do not capture the current changing trends in financial markets therefore placing the lending institutions at risk. Such models have to be reviewed and developed to catch up with the new markets. In some situations credit firms have been said to collude with borrowers to defraud the lenders, such cases have to be dealt with accordingly to ensure such practices do not deter the objectives of credit scores. Even though many lenders use the FICO scores while making decisions on lending, they dont feel satisfied thus they employ their own strategy including evaluating the amount of risk associated with certain products, no unitary score is purely used but several are combine to meet a firms expectation. In conclusion credit scores are a fair measure in estimating potential risk from defaulters, as its seen; its contributing largely to the development of the lending institutions, boosting the confidence of those investing in the credit sphere. Credit scores minimizes the chances of future risk based on just scores but the same scores do not explicitly say that an individual is good or bad. With the shortage posed by the scores, it can be improved by developing a credit model that is effective and relevant in all the sectors and that can greatly help improve in averting defaults. The availability of scores has enable banks to know who qualify to have a loan and what amount at what level of interest rate. It seen also that credit scoring is beyond banks to consumer credit and landlords. The scores have seen firms come together and share information on customer creditworthiness and therefore it can be said that credit scores have been helpful in fighting risk.