critical review and literary analysis from the

The American Scholar

In the Planting season 1999 The American Scholar essay “The Plastic Green Flamingo: An all natural History”, Jennifer Price publishes articles about the popularity of the flamingo garden decorations in the United States. However , shes not just analyzing the distributed of this lawn decoration, rather Price’s intent in writing this essay was going to mock American culture and its materialistic values. The factor she mocks is just how Americans constantly do elegant and weird things to keep with current developments or display their wealth and abundance. She also telephone calls out America as being happy-go-lucky, emotionless, and hypocritical. The popularity of the flamingo lawn decoration was an example of this kind of characteristic of yankee culture inside the early 1900’s. Price delivers her idea through this flamingo as an example. She conveys her thoughts through sculpt and word choice, additional popular illustrations, and by creating implicit messages with usage of background stories and know-how.

The first method that Value communicates her satire can be through her tone and word choice. She uses large words with effective meaning that jump out against the remaining words to produce satire through sarcasm. Your woman uses words and phrases such as “extravagance” and “flamboyance” to describe the flamingo grass decorations. These words happen to be obviously overstated, and it creates a sarcastic and mocking tone. Certainly one of Price’s largest uses of sarcasm is a addition with the sentence “But no matter” after Selling price describes how Americans worn out the indigenous flamingo inhabitants in the United States. This really is obvious sarcasm because nobody believes the extinction of the population is definitely unimportant, apart from the American population that Price regards as reckless and hypocritical in this subject. Price’s make use of sarcasm and satire can be obvious and so the audience can understand Price’s critique states. The whining helps to support Price’s idea because her tone is fun of the flamingo, which she portrays as nothing special. This then simply mocks America because the persons had made this unimportant flamingo into a thing popular, amazing, and trendy.

Furthermore, throughout the essay, Value makes referrals and uses examples of American culture in order to further share her point of view. Her initially use of this is when she creates how “vacationing Americans was flocking to to Fl and coming back again home with flamingo gifts. ” This kind of creates among the Americans themselves and paints the image that people had been getting flamingoes for a long time just because it had been the amazing thing to do. Visitors can use this kind of example of vacationers and in person relate to this and understand the point that Price is aiming to make in their own lives. Later, Value also uses Elvis for example and how he bought a green Cadillac. This kind of example creates the idea that lilac is a color associated with wealth and accomplishment because a movie star had tried it. This connotation of lilac and abundance helps supports Price’s proven fact that Americans bought the flamingoes to fit in. Another reason Price uses the example of Elvis is to create credibility while using audience that help them understand the concept better. Most modern Us citizens know of Elvis and his popularity, so viewers are able to connect to the fame that Elvis had.

In the final paragraph of her dissertation, Price adds more on to her reason for that when American culture the trend of something, People in the usa often your investment history of a subject or image. In essence, your woman calls People in america hypocrites. Price manages to develop this thought because she explains a history of the flamingo as a mark in other nationalities by stating “Early Christian believers associated that with the reddish colored phoenix. In ancient Egypt, it represented the sun the almighty Ra. inch These statements of the past accuse American culture with cultural appropriation, and this idea regards People in the usa as sloppy. Readers can understand that Americans are unaware because Value had mentioned previously the extinction of flamingoes in America, then simply uses these kinds of stories as a method of portraying Americans because cruel since they killed then later applied an important sign to earlier cultures. Consist of ways, Value uses the stories as a means of forcing the readers to feel compassion for the cultures who also are staying erased.

In her essay, Cost continuously claims that People in america in contemporary culture carry out many things to remain with the current trends and fit in with prosperity and popularity. Cost expresses her idea in numerous unspoken fashions. She works on the sarcastic develop, created by simply word choice and sentence structure. She also uses popular illustrations that the target audience can correspond with on a personal level. Price also criticizes the American culture as hypocritical by making use of implicit communications created by stories.