I’m working on a English exercise and need support.
Analytical Report:
Read the essay “What is Luxury?” by Frances Moore Lappe. In a 6-7 paragraph report, analyze her claim and use of examples to illustrate the concept of “luxury”. What kinds of appeals does she use?
Remember to organize your report with an a) Introductory paragraph + Body paragraphs + Concluding paragraph. Your claims must have effective supporting details.
Write in the 3rd person and write a title for your report. About 700-800 words in the MLA style to be written in multiple paragraphs. More than 5 paragraphs.
1) I am looking for a clearly written report not a summary. You must give examples of use of words and phrases that describe what “luxury” is to Lappe. This is how you support the claim that words change meaning and reality. Do they? Think about it. How do you use words? What meaning do you convey? Are you always clear?
2) Reflect on: How this simplicity and inner sense of luxury are different from the cliched understanding of luxury? Develop with details and examples from the essay and Lappe’s reasoning as she unfolds a definition of “luxury,” which you might not be familiar with.
3) Review how to write Introduction and conclusion in your English handbooks if you saved them from Eng. 100. Or use your grammar pocketbook by Diana Hacker for grammar rules.
What is Luxury?
Frances Moore Lappé
Frances Moore Lappé’s career began with her best-selling 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet that offered recipes and a rationale for a high protein meatless diet. Through the subsequent decades she has continued her work in promoting sustainable food development. This excerpt is taken from EcoMind Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want (2011).
Moving beyond the false dichotomy—either material fixation or boring lives—starts with rethinking luxury itself. It happened to me unexpectedly.
In 2006 I journeyed with my extended family—ages six to seventy-three—to the Amazonian region or Peru, eventually moving in a small boat along the Tambopata River.
After several hours, we hopped off the boat for a short hike on a narrow jungle path until we reached a large clearing. There, we got our first glimpse of our resting place, an airy structure built largely of bamboo and on stilts. Climbing the wide stairs, we entered a large, open, multilayered gathering space with high ceilings, flowers, and decorative wall hangings. I was enchanted.
And that was before our first meal in a dining room with colourful macaws swooping in to alight on high wood beams above us. And before I strolled in the early evening stillness along an open “bridge,” lit on both sides by lanterns, to my bedroom, where my mosquito netting appeared more like an elegant canopy than an insect barrier. And before I lay listening to the soft jungle sounds, so clear and present because the room’s outer wall reached only to my waist.
We stayed just a few days. But as we packed into the same small boat to leave, I realized my perception had been forever altered. I had learned that, for me, luxury is beauty but beauty is not a luxury.
This hotel had little electricity, no private baths, and no chandeliers, no carpets, no spa, no granite fountains. But it was by far the most luxurious hotel I’d ever stayed in. My need for creature comfort was more than met–it was indulged, as I savored local dishes and rocked in the colourful hammock watching the monkeys play. And my mind was stimulated delightfully by encounters with scientists studying the rain forest and my own observations of the flora and fauna along the jungle paths.
My epiphany, redefining luxury as beauty, happened far from home through a particular experience I realize that, because of its location, isn’t available to most of us. Yet, much of my pleasure came from being intimate with the natural world, and that opportunity is available to virtually all of us. Thus, opportunity to rethink luxury is everywhere, at any moment—including right now in my Boston home as I sit here taking in the beauty of delicate icicles, dangling at least four feet just outside my dining room window.
“Luxury as beauty” has nothing to do with a particular place or an object’s price tag. It is seeing with eyes for beauty. Once we cut the automatic but learned connection between buying stuff and pleasure, we can actively cultivate new connections—a sense of freedom as we shed draining habits and discover new pleasures in seeing and creating beauty all around us.
