Travelers: Fantasists, Conjurers, and Seers of the World
Haley Stewart
English 101
Marshall University
Travelers: Fantasists, Conjurers, and Seers of the World
What makes traveling to foreign lands such a coveted and memorable experience? What does one get out of exploring new cultures and atmospheres? In “The Shock of Teapots,” by Cynthia Ozick, the quality and nature of traveling and travelers themselves is explored. Within this work of creative nonfiction, Ozick strategically uses genre, diction, and exemplification to effectively emphasize that travelers see ordinary things in a new light when visiting other places and countries.
She starts off by discussing a morning during a Swedish autumn. She describes the morning using a lot of imagery, saying things such as that it is enveloped in “a mysteriously translucent shadow” and it’s “as if a faintly luminous river ran overhead” (pg. 68). Ozick looks at the sun in a new light, being in country that is foreign to her. She does this throughout the rest of the essay, too, speaking of the wonder of seeing and experiencing everyday things in new places. Ozick goes on to say that travel causes people to be more attuned to their surroundings--they notice more and are intrigued by more. She says this is because they have “cut themselves loose” from their own society (pg. 69). She expresses that in doing this, travelers are so encompassed in new, foreign experiences. And since new things are basically the norm in traveling, it makes ordinary things similar to what we experience at home become so much more noticeable and even remarkable. She expands on this idea by describing the red bus she traveled on from the airport in Edinburgh. She says, “It was the bus, not the phantasmagorical castle, that clouded over and bewildered our reasoned humanity. The red bus was what I intimately knew: only I had never seen it before,” (pg. 70). Even a teapot shocks when one is a traveler.
As previously stated, the most conspicuous rhetorical strategies used in this short story
English 101
Marshall University
Travelers: Fantasists, Conjurers, and Seers of the World
What makes traveling to foreign lands such a coveted and memorable experience? What does one get out of exploring new cultures and atmospheres? In “The Shock of Teapots,” by Cynthia Ozick, the quality and nature of traveling and travelers themselves is explored. Within this work of creative nonfiction, Ozick strategically uses genre, diction, and exemplification to effectively emphasize that travelers see ordinary things in a new light when visiting other places and countries.
She starts off by discussing a morning during a Swedish autumn. She describes the morning using a lot of imagery, saying things such as that it is enveloped in “a mysteriously translucent shadow” and it’s “as if a faintly luminous river ran overhead” (pg. 68). Ozick looks at the sun in a new light, being in country that is foreign to her. She does this throughout the rest of the essay, too, speaking of the wonder of seeing and experiencing everyday things in new places. Ozick goes on to say that travel causes people to be more attuned to their surroundings--they notice more and are intrigued by more. She says this is because they have “cut themselves loose” from their own society (pg. 69). She expresses that in doing this, travelers are so encompassed in new, foreign experiences. And since new things are basically the norm in traveling, it makes ordinary things similar to what we experience at home become so much more noticeable and even remarkable. She expands on this idea by describing the red bus she traveled on from the airport in Edinburgh. She says, “It was the bus, not the phantasmagorical castle, that clouded over and bewildered our reasoned humanity. The red bus was what I intimately knew: only I had never seen it before,” (pg. 70). Even a teapot shocks when one is a traveler.
As previously stated, the most conspicuous rhetorical strategies used in this short story