1. King uses his description of segregation as the basis for an argument. What is the central claim of that arguments? What does King ask his audience to do about the situation he describes?
2. What does King mean by "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism"? Why does he warn his audience to resist it?
3. In King's vision, the oppressed do not rise up and crush their oppressors. Why not? How do the details by which he defines his dream fit in with what King tells his audience in paragraphs 6-7 and with his general philosophy of nonviolence?
4. King relies heavily on Figures of Speech throughout his address, particularly metaphor: The nation has given its black citizens a "bad check"; racial injustice is "quicksand"; brotherhood is a "table"; freedom is a bell that rings from the "hilltops". Choose several of these figures that you find effective, and explain how they help King to compare and contrast the "appalling condition" of the past and present with his brighter vision for the future.
Answer:
movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.
