The Assignment:
This assignment rests entirely with your ability to discuss Paul from the
vantage point of Rodriguez’s expanded Scholarship Boy model. You’ll
want to take into account as well how race/ethnicity, social class,
assimilation, and language work their ways into Paul’s plight, as he
attempts to escape his social position, similar to how Rodriguez
described in his own educational autobiography. And assume your
reader is familiar with the works in order to avoid unnecessary summary
in your body paragraphs. The focus, then, is the Scholarship Boy model
and how Paul represents it. And with that, good luck.
Context:
Certainly the primary drive that propels Richard Rodriguez’s “The
Achievement of Desire” centers on the idea of the Scholarship Boy, a phrase
borrowed from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. However, Rodriguez
expands Hoggart’s definition of the (white, “working-class”) Scholarship Boy to
include the complications that arise for a Scholarship Boy from a different race
and ethnicity, one who is also trying to assimilate, but not simply into a higher
class but a dominant culture entirely foreign to the one he (or she) enjoys at
home.
This idea of alienation from the mainstream, dominant culture is also
represented in various ways in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. The
central character, Paul “Poitier-Kittredge,” becomes fixated on assimilating into
the dominant culture (represented by Flan & Ouisa Kittredge) that has so far
excluded him, and we see throughout the film examples of a character (Paul)
who cultivates the Scholarship Boy’s ability to become “the great mimic; a
collector of thoughts, not a thinker,” to use Rodriguez’s parlance from his chapter.
Essay Topic Question
HOW and/or WHY is Paul from
Six Degrees of Separation a
representation of Richard
Rodriguez’s Scholarship Boy, as
described in the chapter
excerpt, “The Achievement of
Desire,” while taking into
account race/ethnicity, social
class, assimilation, and
language in your response?