A Postcolonial Reading of Frank McCourt

Post-colonialism, as an academic discipline, analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The Irish American writer Frank McCourt won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Later in 1999, he authored ‘Tis, which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela’s Ashes and detailing his life after he returned to New York. Being mostly analyzed within the framework of personal growth or feminism, Frank McCourt’s memoir, therefore, has been regarded as a motivational life story. Within the postcolonial context, however, his memoir can be interpreted from a quite different perspective. Although Ireland has never been a colony of America, certain critical concepts from post-colonialism can be applied to the exploration of the identity formation of Frank McCourt.

THE POVERTY AND STRUGGLE OF FRANK MC COURT IN ANGELA’S ASHES

One of the literary works is novel. In novel we can find many kinds of characterization. The researcher chooses this novel as the data source because the novel is good to be analyzed about the struggle of human life. It will be a great inspiration and motivation to people who was born in poverty. So, this research aims to find out the characteristics of poverty of Frank McCourt by using a sociological approach and to describe the indicators of poverty as a social problem. The character starts from the child until frank McCourt to be succeed to face the obstacles in poverty. Besides that, the writer wants to know the struggles of Frank McCourt’s life and how he can survive in poverty as a child. As a result, the reader can get the spirit of Frank McCourt’s struggle and about his thought in many kinds character. This research used qualitative method in analyzing the data. The data was collected from a novel of Frank McCourt “Angela’s Ashes” and in the form of quotation from novel that related to Frank McCourt’s character. The result of this research is the characteristics of poverty of Frank McCourt influenced by charity, health, government, justice institution, Limerick community, family, ethnocentrism, and employment office. There are also some indicators of poverty that show the struggle of Frank McCourt to survive in poverty, including: struggle in starving, in the bad situation that makes his father becomes alcoholic and her mother becomes a beggar, poor clothing and housing, and suffers from ill health.

DISCOURSE AND THIRD SPACE IN FRANK MCCOURT�S NOVEL "TEACHER MAN" AND TOM SCHULMAN�S PLAY "DEAD POETS SOCIETY"; A REFLECTIVE PRACTICE FOR TEACHERS

Pahl and Rowsell (2005) elucidate that Discourse is ways of dressing, speaking and acting which delineates person�s identities in literacy practices, while a third space is as a meeting spaces between home space and school space, blend and mix space, in which lets teachers think how their students� meaning-making are happened between school and home. This paper investigates how these theories are fruitfully presented in the character of Mr. McCourt Teacher Man and Mr. Keating Dead Poets Society. Subsequently, it is interconnected with educational theory A taxonomy for Learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom�s taxonomy of educational objectives, as recommended by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). The result shows that the Metacognitive Knowledge domain prominently becomes the intersection as it is emphasizing on the student�s awareness of one�s own cognition and cognitive processes, particularly contextualizing students� knowledge and general knowledge. Mr. McCourt and Mr. Keating have succeeded in shifting frighten and strict classroom situation generated by most teachers become so challenging and much interesting by utilizing multimodal styles and skills, and piloting third space activity. Henceforth, the writer recommends teachers to maximize their own potentials characters to accommodate their students� preferences or styles in learning the subjects. In addition, designing teaching and learning process in-between home and school is necessary to be done, in order to contextualizing and perceiving real life experiences.

The poetry of accumulation: Irish-American fables of resistance

Eamonn Wall’s discussion of Irish American Catholic experience reveals many similarities on either side of the pond, and some differences also. The Irish American authors and commentators provide unique perspectives on many facets of Irish life, including the unique role played by the Catholic Church. Among the authors discussed are Frank McCourt, whose account of a poor Catholic childhood in Limerick is so memorably captured in the best-seller, Angela’s Ashes, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín and Mary Gordon. Similarly, the theologian Richard P. McBrien, journalist and writer Maureen Dezell, and sociologist Andrew Greely combine to illustrate the impact that the Irish Church has had on its American equivalent. Wall maintains that looking towards Ireland from the US, and drawing on American notions of egalitarianism and individual freedom, sometimes allows for a more dispassionate view of Ireland’s Catholic heritage and enables envisaging its future with a far greater clarity than can be achieved when change is all around you.