Literary Analysis of White Privilege

Introduction

Scholars have long agreed: Luke loves words. The language of the Gospel of Luke has been hailed as the best Greek in the New Testament, and the unstoppable divine word emerges as an undeniable motif throughout Luke-Acts. Even a brief comparison with its canonical counterparts demonstrates that, thematically, the Gospel of Luke is preoccupied with the power of spoken words. In the religious perspective, one arranges words in sequences, ties them together with grammatical signals and rhetorical devices, and ultimately builds them into sentences and paragraphs and discourses. This much is commonly understood. What is not so well understood is the function that silence plays in the overall construction. Just as music without silence collapses into cacophony, so words without silence signify nothing. The silences are the invisible, inaudible cement that can hold the entire edifice together. The religious scholars have examined the multiple ways that the Lukan portrayals of words and silences function together toward particular rhetorical ends. Therefore, all the issues and aspects related to Literary Analysis of White Privilege. All the work has been done in context of the religious perspectives.

Discussion

Understandably, the concept of silence often escapes notice altogether. Silence is slippery; trying to describe it is like trying to grab hold of running water. Still, many different critical approaches offer conceptual tools to aid in this task; silence has been profitably analyzed in terms of its context of expression (silence in a library differs from silence in a torture chamber), its source (personal choice or external pressure, for example), and its interpersonal functions (silence can alienate, or silence can unify). On a most basic level, we can distinguish between silences that are external or internal to the communication process. Some silences, such as students reading silently in a classroom are not expected to communicate anything; they are external to the communication process. Other silences such as conversational pauses or eloquent silences function within the communication process and are therefore internal to it (Aune, 143).

The latter types, those silences internal to the communication process, provoke varying responses from observers. Cinema again provides a helpful illustration. Consider the difference between silent films and the “talking pictures” that appeared onscreen in the 1920s. Silent cinema was defined by its lack of synchronized recorded dialogue; Charlie Chaplin declared that “talkies” were “ruining the great beauty of silence and yet, pitting silence against sound obscures the complex relationship between them and ignores the experiential effects silence can have on viewers. Even after sound effects were introduced into film production, silence remained a crucial and powerful aspect of movie soundtracks. Imagine, for instance, film Editor Walter Murch's use of silence in The English Patient (1996): after the main character Caravaggio cries out in protest while his torturers prepare to cut off his thumbs, he is met with silence (McIntosh, pp. 01). The effect is chilling. In this sense, we might say that silence is itself a sound effect. Silences in literary texts similarly function as foundational features ...