Society's Child
Opgave B
Extract from Janis Ian’s Society’s Child – My Autobiography
Fifteen years old, alone, scared and on the verge of crying. Yes, no teenage girl can say that they have not been there, maybe you got dumped by your boyfriend, or your crush started dating someone other than you, or maybe it is just your hormones going crazy, but all girls, maybe even as far as all humans have felt this. However only a small number of people have felt this on stage with a guitar in your hands and a group of people screaming “nigger lover”1 at your face, during what should have been the time of your life.
So what do you do? Do you let your fears conquer everything and let the stupid minority of society bring you down?
Janice Ian stood in this exact situation. Her first hit single Society’s Child was a song about an interracial romance forbidden by the girl’s mother and frowned upon by her friends and others. In the song the girl decides to end the relationship, and succumb to the malcontents.
This was the song that caused what could be seen as riots across the US and particularly in the southern states.
Janice Ian tells about her experience in her book from 2009 Society’s Child – My Autobiography.
The entire text is one big flashback, about the time the fifteen-year-old Janice Ian had to leave the stage, mid song, in fear. The text is based entirely on the experience that Janice Ian had, and is also told by her, which makes the story very subjective since she acts as the first person narrator. This is of course a know characteristic in autobiographies.
It is clearly shown through out the text that it is written in a subjective style, since there used a number of “I” and “my”, this is made clear already in sentence two “I was standing alone on a stage in Encino…”2.
Sometimes when dealing with a subjective text and a first person narrator, the entire argumentation and point of the text can come of as weak and unreliable because the author is unable to get
Extract from Janis Ian’s Society’s Child – My Autobiography
Fifteen years old, alone, scared and on the verge of crying. Yes, no teenage girl can say that they have not been there, maybe you got dumped by your boyfriend, or your crush started dating someone other than you, or maybe it is just your hormones going crazy, but all girls, maybe even as far as all humans have felt this. However only a small number of people have felt this on stage with a guitar in your hands and a group of people screaming “nigger lover”1 at your face, during what should have been the time of your life.
So what do you do? Do you let your fears conquer everything and let the stupid minority of society bring you down?
Janice Ian stood in this exact situation. Her first hit single Society’s Child was a song about an interracial romance forbidden by the girl’s mother and frowned upon by her friends and others. In the song the girl decides to end the relationship, and succumb to the malcontents.
This was the song that caused what could be seen as riots across the US and particularly in the southern states.
Janice Ian tells about her experience in her book from 2009 Society’s Child – My Autobiography.
The entire text is one big flashback, about the time the fifteen-year-old Janice Ian had to leave the stage, mid song, in fear. The text is based entirely on the experience that Janice Ian had, and is also told by her, which makes the story very subjective since she acts as the first person narrator. This is of course a know characteristic in autobiographies.
It is clearly shown through out the text that it is written in a subjective style, since there used a number of “I” and “my”, this is made clear already in sentence two “I was standing alone on a stage in Encino…”2.
Sometimes when dealing with a subjective text and a first person narrator, the entire argumentation and point of the text can come of as weak and unreliable because the author is unable to get