ABSTRACT
We begin with two passages to provide concrete examples of assimilationand contrast. The first, which illustrates contrast, is an editorial fromthe New York Times (2006): “We thought President Bush’s two recent Supreme Court nominees set new lows when it came to giving vague and meaningless answers to legitimate questions, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made them look like models of openness when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday about domestic spying” (p. A-22). The second, which illustrates both contrast and assimilation, is from a description of a character in novelist Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth: “. . . the heroine Lily Bart-no longer as young as she once was, the financial promises made to her failing to pan out, her prospects at marriage dwindling daily, has a friend named Gerty Farish. Gerty is also unmarried. Gerty has no annuity. Gerty takes her meals in public dining rooms with other single women. And she does so good-naturedly. Every time Lily sees Gerty, she experiences an interval of panic. Wharton writes: ‘. . . the restrictions of Gerty’s life, which once has the charm of contrast, now reminded [Lily] too painfully of the limits to which her own existence was shrinking’ ” (Rakoff, 2001, p. 60).
