Describe The Divergent Ways In Which The Two Writers Using Language

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DATE \@ "MMMM d, y" February 9, 2018
Lorde and Roth’s Use of Language
The most striking difference between Philip Roth and Audre Lorde’s writing is their style and tone. While both writers communicated their opinions and intentions clearly in each of the piece they’ve written pertaining to inequality, Audre Lorde comes across as more persuasive. She tends to move her audience to action. Roth, on the other hand, uses narrative to engage his readers in a lighter tone. He uses stories that allow his audience to understand where he is coming from but do not necessarily move them to action. Both writers, as it appears, have somehow similar views on the matter, being both part of a minority group yet there are striking differences in their use of language in their writing. Philip Roth is a storyteller who uses descriptive language to engage his readers while Audre Lorde uses a direct approach, maintaining precision in words to present her arguments as opposed to telling stories.
In The New Yorker’s Life and Letters column in its June 2017 issue published in newyorker.com, Roth expressed his feelings about the alienation that he and his family had to struggle with in post-war America, albeit indirectly. He did not use words that directly described the treatment that he received from society such as “injustice”. No such word was present in his writing. Yet, it becomes apparent that the notion existed in his environment and he experienced it firsthand as one reads his retelling. In his story, he spoke of writers who shaped his sense of his country and along the way, he mentioned a few details about his life in relation to those writers that indirectly reveals his feelings of oppression. He mentioned that his parents, being Jewish immigrants, knew that they were being stigmatized by society and were “regarded as repellent alien outsiders” (Roth). Nevertheless, Roth manages to focus on the way that those writers and his experiences have shaped him to be a better person and writer.
Roth said that because of the writers who shaped his sense of country, one can “stand up to intimidation and intolerance”. He told of the story of how reading such writers expanded his view of the world and that because of their works, he became optimistic of his chances in life, despite being a minority. He said that he would not object being called a “Newark Jew” even if it meant that he was a “product of the lower-middle class” (Roth). The term, according to him, simply describes him as someone who grew up in the Newark, New Jersey’s southwest corner even though it was tied to ethnic pressure, xenophobic antipathy, and inequality in the workplace. This provoked in him the “incipient novelist” with a mimetic urge. Even though he...