C

“I FELL IN LOVE OR MY HORMONES

AWAKENED”By Judith Ortiz Cofer

Type of Essay

•Narrative

Informal or Formal

• Informal

•Content

• Sentence structure

•Formal

•Word choice

Characterization

•Direct

• “a beautiful new student named Sophia, a recent Polish

immigrant, whose English was still practically unintelligible, but

whose features, classically perfect without a trace of makeup,

enthralled us. Everyone talked about her gold hair cascading

past her waist, and her voice which could carry a note right up

to heaven in choir” (484).

• “our best basketball player, a tall, red-haired senior” (484)

Figurative Language

• Simile

• “He looked like a young Marlon Brando” (482).

• “I felt like a pilgrim waiting for a glimpse of Mecca” (483)

• “Dressed in a white outfit like a surgeon” (483)

• “Stood there like an idiot” (483)

• “we labored like frantic Roman slaves” (483)

• “authentic in sheets of material that folded over their bodies like the garments on a statue by Michelangelo” (484)

• “glittered like a statue” (484)

• “like the phantom lover” (485)

• “my cells were tuning up like musicians” (485)

• “what seemed like an eternity” (486)

• Metaphor

• “the cite of Paterson becoming a concrete oven” (483)

Figurative Language

•Allusions

•Marlon Brando

Figurative Language

•Allusions

•Mecca

Figurative Language

•Allusions

•Michelangelo Statues

Figurative Language

•Allusions

• Fates

The Fates also called the Moirae, were 3 sisters who were in charge of

the destiny of every living thing in Greece. Even though they were in

charge of all LIVING things they lived in the underworld.

Clotho represented the present. She spun the thread of life onto her

spindle. Clotho was in charge of choosing when some one would be

born ,when one was born she was called upon during the last month

of pregnancy (to help give life to the unborn child).

Lachesis represented the past. She measured the thread of life and

determined how long ones life should be. She also helped the dead

choose their next lives by assigning them their next life (or lot). It was

said that within 3 days of a child being born that Lachesis and her

sisters would arrive to decide the child's fate.

Atropos represented the future. She choose when and how one would

die by cutting the thread of life with her scissors.

Figurative Language

•Allusions

•Nubian slaves

Slavery in Sudan began in ancient times, and

recently had a resurgence during the 1983 to 2005

Second Sudanese Civil War. During the Trans-

Saharan slave trade, many Nilotic peoples from

the lower Nile Valley were purchased as slaves

and brought to work elsewhere in North Africa and

the Orient by Nubians, Egyptians, Berbers and

Arabs.

Figurative Language

• Imagery

• “sat across the room from me looking supremely bored. I watched his every move, taking him in

gluttonously. I relished the shadow of his eyelashes on his ruddy cheeks, his pouty lips smirking

sarcastically at the ridiculous sight of our little play. Once he slumped down on his chair, and

our sergeant-at-arms nun came over and tapped him sharply on his shoulder. He drew himself

up slowly, with disdain” (484).

• Irony

• You don’t find true love at 14

• “the few times I saw him in the hallway, he was always rushing away” (486). The reality “that the

kiss was nothing but a little trophy for his ego” finally hit the protagonist(486).

Figurative Language

• Idiom

• “hoping to see my prince” (483)

• “I could have died” (483)

• “her voice which could carry a note right up to heaven in choir” (484).

• “my body was changing right there” (485)

• Oxymoron

• “sweet agony” (483)

• Personification

• “adulation leaves a scent” (483)

• “killing power of those dark pupils” (485).

• “my heart knocked” (485)

• Foreshadowing

• “my father…in his phosphorescent white, Navy uniform” (485).

Humor

• “my mother smoked her L&M’s with so little enthusiasm

that I thought (God, no!) that she might be cutting

down on her smoking or maybe even giving up the

habit. At this crucial time” (483)!

• “mimeographed handouts were the school-day buzz

that the new Xerox generation of kids is missing out on”

(483).

Theme

• Jabs at society

• “physical beauty qualified them for the starring roles” (484)

• Jabs at human nature

• “I must have been my worse critic, self-conscious as I was” (484)

• Life Lesson

• “the object is not always to win, but most times simply to keep your opponent (synonymous at

times with ‘the loved one’) guessing” (486)

• Lessons on love

• “I learned to make myself visible and to relish the little battles required to win the greatest prize

of all” (486)

• “if love were easy, life would be too simple” (486)

Setting/Mood

• Setting during kiss- dark hallway-> mood before kiss- suspense