Interpretion of Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture in a Different Way and Comparison Between the Two (I Got a 70% on This, so It Isn't the Best Choice)

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ZAIN ZAIN-UL-ABIDIN 4(A) 09/17/2012 TONI MORRISON ASSINGMENT (QUESTION 4) "You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." The death of culture is directly related to the death of language. One need not worry about one's cultural traditions or liturgies if the language is languishing. In the folklore of several cultures, the tale of an old, blind woman is told. She is asked whether the 'bird-in-the-hand' is alive, dead or dying. An American writer, novelist and professor 'Toni Morrison', in her, 'Nobel lecture', has explained this 'bird-in-the-hand' as a language, but this is purely her interpretation; accounting that the symbolic 'bird' can be comprehended in various ways, such as culture, which being a universal ideal, has close correlation to language and is confronting the same settings as that of the 'bird'; alive, dead or dying. The talk about liveliness of culture would mean that it is assailable to death, and hence a question arises in the minds of many, “Is culture really cursed with mortality, and is it that feeble?” If a language can be susceptible to erasure, then so can a culture be vulnerable to demise. A writer would think of a language passing when it can no longer fill displeasing silences engraved in hearts of the despaired. But the death of a culture is discernible when it cannot impart what is beyond the barrier of self-worship. Just as the 1st civilizations of the world have long gone and have become a mere affair of research. Their conservative thinking was the cause of their culture’s parvitude. Toni Morrison believes that the demise of a language makes everyone accountable for it. In the same way, everyone is responsible for the collapse of a culture. She has mentioned the children in her country who have cut off their tongues and taken to bullets instead. This is the deterioration of a

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