I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read Fallacy Identification

Francine Prose uses several fallacies her argument to convince her audience that literature such as *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings* and similar pieces are not pieces that should be used to teach the younger generations. The first logical Prose resorts to is ad hominem: she criticizes teachers by calling them “lazy or uninspired”, qualities of teachers in which give a negative connotation. Prose then goes on the criticize how Angelou’s work, citing her as the source of “terrible mysteries”, “stale, inaccurate similes”, “murky, turgid, convoluted language of this sort constitutes good writing”, and “parasitic moss.” Stating these insults towards Angelou only switches the argument towards Angelou. This would also coincide with the hasty generalization fallacy. By almost providing close to no context with Angelou's metaphors, the audience is guaranteed to generalize all of her metaphors as meaningless. Towards the end, she again hastily generalizes that all books similar to *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings* and ***To Kill a Mockingbird** with other well known pieces including ***The Great Gatsby**, etc. Just because these novels are used to teach and educate people does not mean that they are similar literature, each novel has their own unique elements in which each author has spent time adding. Finally equivocating is used with the italicization of “never” when she states “…a chance to consider thorny issue of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would *never* harbor the racist attitudes…” She provides a double meaning with the italicization: is it a genuine never or sarcastic? The use of these logical fallacies in Prose’s article does bring down the value of her argument of how these pieces of literature should not be used within education.