...The Great American Disillusionment in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Conjecture clouds an American man’s pursuit of success, leading to unfortunate ends in Arthur Miller's timeless production, Death of a Salesman. A post-depression era drama, Death of a Salesman challenges its audience to analyze universal components of the American Dream. Most people consider success a collision of past effort, future goals, and an appreciation for the present. Miller's character Willy Loman is convinced attractiveness, popularity, and physical prowess is all any man needs for prosperity. In the beginning, Miller introduces Willy's flawed insight linking personal attractiveness to success. Act I opens with a conversation between Willy and his wife, Linda. While discussing their son, Biff, Willy wonders how, “a young man with such – personal attractiveness, gets lost” (Miller 1237). Proudly, Willy continues his high praise asking Linda if she remembers how they all used to follow Biff around in high school and, “When he smiled … their faces lit up” (1237). As critic, Chester E. Eisinger points out, Willy so thoroughly indoctrinates his sons with his dreams of success they, are victims of illusions” (Eisinger 101). They invent, “impossible schemes for making money,” (101). Willy’s corruption, “prevents his sons from achieving a mature manhood” (101). Willy even stoops to dishonesty and self-destruction in his efforts to appear successful. His appreciation for physical appearance extends...
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...Young Goodman Brown in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" with Roderick Usher from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," one must first understand the motivating factor each man has of the world around him and how they react to that world. Both Brown and Usher suffer from disillusionment and an emotional seperation from family due to a traumatic experience they were unable or unwilling to recover from, thereby tarnishing their lust for life. Neither man is able to rise above the feelings that resulted from these occurrences. Although Usher and Brown are two different men, they fear the same thing, death. Usher had an irrational fear of death itself, whereas Brown was afraid of falling victim to sin and burn in Hell for all eternity. Young Goodman Brown is a true Puritan, motivated by his faith. Brown is innocent and somewhat naive in his view of the world around him. He partakes of a journey through the dark woods one night with a man presumed to be the devil himself. This experience awakens him to the abundance of deceit and sinful behavior of not only those he once respected but his family as well. While discussing Brown's solid christian family history, the stranger comments "I have been as well acquainted with your family as ever a one among the Puritans" (391). Brown realizes that even good christian men and women fall to the temptation of sin. However, knowing this does not lessen the fear and shame he feels that he himself might also succumb to sin...
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...gender roles are clearly defined. Women are expected to learn to cook and care for their husbands, who are, of course, expected to be the sole breadwinners. But on the other hand, Jess sees herself as a female version of her hero, David Beckham, competing in soccer rather than cooking for an acceptable Indian man as tradition dictates. However, although her parents tolerated her sports passion when she was younger, they now believe she should become serious about her life and prepare for the future. That means giving up "children's games" for cooking lessons, marriage, and university studies. They forbid her from playing any more. An Indian girl should not play soccer, since the game consists of "displaying your bare legs to complete strangers." The preparations for her sister's wedding only underscore the liabilities of Jess's unladylike behavior. After watching this movie I realized that in parenting you have to be flexible, strict, and do some discipline. You teach, and talk to you child about rules, and if those rules are broken what the consequences will be. You explain to them what it was like when you grew up and how life is now, because times are changing and you must accommodate to those changes also. Always let your children know that they can always come to you know matter what and talk to you. By doing this you listen and you do not judge them by the things that they might say. Be there for your child no matter what he/she turns out to be in life. The way you raise...
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...if they were there. Hughes was simply explaining the distance of the generations and how they differed in their way of thinking of certain concepts. The disillusionment Hughes had is significant in the way children process things. Extended Response IV: Portraying a Person Toni Morrison, "Strangers" (138, 2-3) Toni Morrison anecdotally portrays this image of a woman who she talked to for a total of fifteen minutes. She starts the story off by giving a snapshot of what this old woman looks like and what she would have appeared to be like. The story starts off by Morrison calling the River Place hers by saying “newly mine” (Morrison, 138), this is the first noticeable problem in this story because she is taking ownership of something she does not possess. As the reader you first gather by the men's clothes over a dress that the old women wore to be considered an “Other”, also by the stories Morrison created when the old woman did not show again. She immediately jumps to conclusions about the old woman's real reason for being at the neighbors house. She refers to another philosopher that talks about how the “Other's” makes it hard for humans to love strangers, but instead bring about a sense of fear and our tendency to be skeptical of strangers. The simple fact that there is no such thing as strangers, just different versions of ourselves adds to the idea of the subjective world, similar to the ideas of Nabokov. I agree that it could be dangerous to sentimentalize...
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...THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST AS A MONOLOGUE MONOLOGUE: A monologue is presented by a single character, most often to express the mental thoughts aloud, sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common in dramatic media as well as in non-dramatic media such as poetry. Monologues share much in common with several other literary devices including soliloquies and apostrophes. DEVICE OF MONOLOGUE IN THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST: This is probably the only novel of its kind, a novel with no lyrical descriptions of people and places. It has no dialogue at all; in fact, the entire novel is a long, gripping monologue. A novel in the form of a monologue and without a dialogue is a brilliant and novel idea, and it works magnificently in this case only because Mohsin Hamid is a superb writer with formidable powers. He grips the reader's mind with polished and haunting prose. The hero of the novel, Changez, a student from Lahore, Pakistan, attends Princeton University. After graduation at the top in his class, he secures an excellent and well-paying job at the elite valuation firm Underwood Samson. He becomes well-adjusted and well-accustomed to the American way of life, falls in love with the beautiful and elegant, Princeton-educated Erica, who hails from an aristocratic family. For the first time in his life Changez is happy. Then, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2001...
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...living hope found only in the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. St Paul wrote to his friends at Corinth, "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead" (1 Cor 15:19,20). But on that first Easter day that living hope was far from being established in the experience of the two people we read of in the New Testament lesson (Luke 24:13-35). Let’s put ourselves in their shoes as they set out on the seven-mile walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. It was a: HEART-BREAKING EXPERIENCE Have you ever noticed that some of the saddest words in our language begin with the letter D? For example, disappointment, doubt, disillusionment, defeat, despair and death. All of these are summed up in the words of Cleopas and his companion to the stranger who joined them on the Emmaus road. They had left the dispirited and confused band of disciples with the events of Good Friday fresh in their memories. We can sympathize with their bewilderment. The Master they had revered, loved and followed had been horribly put to death - a cruel death of the most degrading kind. Death by...
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...F. Scott Fitzgerald is in many ways one of the most notable writers of the twentieth century. His prodigious literary voice and style provides remarkable insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous, as well as himself. Exploring themes such as disillusionment, coming of age, and the corruption of the American Dream, Fitzgerald based most of his subject matter on his own despicable, tragic life experiences. Although he was thought to be the trumpeter of the Jazz Age, he never directly identified himself with it and was adverse to many of its manifestations. The life of F. Scott Fitzgerald was deeply divided, in that his early successes in the 1910’s and 1920’s contrast noticeably with the years full of personal happenings and self doubt. It was divided, among all, between the pursuit of the artistic ideal and the continual lure of easy success. He became a victim of the myth of success and money instead of the perpetrator. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s incredible prose style and beautiful talent shined through his tragic, disillusioned life and he was able to successful create a beautiful world for his readers to escape to. In the early 1920’s, Fitzgerald was accepted as a symbol of youthful sophistication. He became intensely aware of the strangeness and mystery behind the rich at a young age, and tried so hard to echo their actions through sheen curiosity and characterization. It was then that he established a rich and enduring symbolic value throughout his...
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...Scott Perreault December 5, 2012 Assimilation or Humiliation In “The School Days of an Indian Girl” written by Zitkala Sa, we are thrust into the issues confronting the Native American population. White European culture was the controlling force in this era of misunderstanding and ethnocentricity. They felt threatened by a culture they did not understand, and so in response and a need to alleviate the pain of their insecurity, they required that the young Native American be assimilated into the ways of the White. The narrator who is immersed in this unreal reality is forced to submit, to resist is futile. The innocent girl from the reservation becomes a success story to the white man, but in doing so is alienated from family. The dreamlike excitement of the train journey to the school would soon become a nightmare of sorts for her and her companions. It took very little time to discover that this was not her land, and her habitation here only aroused suspicion and mistrust. Sa writes, “I had arrived in the land of rosy skies, but I was not happy, as I had thought I should be” (Zitkala Sa, 1140). It is evident here that although the landscape is quite appealing and pleasant to the senses, she realizes that beauty is skin deep, and what lies beneath is an affront to her. For her everything is foreign; no sense of familiarity to envelop her, but her spirit did stay intact. From time to time, her anger exuded the rebellious spirit within. “With fire in my heart, I took the...
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...Name ENG 106 Professor 13 June 2011 The Linkage between “Teddy” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” J.D. Salinger’s stories “Teddy” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” share similarities between the main characters, the tragic fate of the main characters, and the author’s continued theme of the shallowness that existed in American culture in the 1950’s. In another of Salinger’s stories “Seymour: an Introduction,” it is mentioned that Seymour’s brother Buddy wrote “Teddy,” and described Teddy as having Seymour’s eyes (Kaufman 132). Buddy also says the people tell him his stories are all about Seymour, which further suggests a link between the two characters (Kaufman 132). Seymour and Teddy are both outcasts that share their lives with people that they are emotionally disconnected from. They are unable to assimilate into the world around them and therefore their stories come to a similar conclusion. Seymour and Teddy share many similarities that lead the reader to assume Salinger was attempting to provide a linkage between the stories. Seymour appears to be mild mannered though it is obvious he is disturbed mentally. He lives in isolation from his wife and from others in his social circle. Even doctors that are treating him cannot understand or help him recover. His wife dismisses Seymour’s mental stability in her conversation with her mother, and is more concerned with talking about the psychiatrist’s drinking habits and his wife’s ugly dress, than to ask him questions...
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...This film, written and directed by Noah Baumback, takes place in Park Slope Brooklyn 1986. Some critics claim that the film reflects the writer’s personal experience of his parents divorce. Both were involved in the literary field. The film was cited as a letter of hate towards the writer’s own father. While the film is ostensibly about a divorce and a family in crisis it is in principal a sensitive coming of age story primarily from the perspective of a 16-year-old adolescent. It is also a fascinating portrayal of the obstacles that a parent with narcissistic features can present in the child’s struggle for independence. The Squid and the Whale is about divisions, about clashing forces; the mother and father, the child and parent, the intellectual and the philistine, the appearance of things and their true nature. Underlying each of these conflicts and every scene in the film is the battle between cynical detachment and vulnerability. The opening lines “Me and Mom vs. You and Dad sets the stage for an excessively competitive doubles tennis. Younger son Frank sides with Mom where older brother Walter proudly joins the father who gives some questionable advice regarding her backstroke. Competitive games are repeated throughout the film’ boxing, ping-pong. The fiercest competition is the literary competition to publish that both parents are engaged in. In this area the father condescendingly tries to give advise for his wife to improve her writing. Characters ...
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...of xenophobic violence. In 2000 and 2001, Amnesty International’s annual online reports on South Africa singled out attacks and ill treatment of asylumseekers and suspected illegal immigrants as a major source of concern. The 2001 report also recounts reports of abuses of undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers. These included unlawfully prolonged detentions, poor conditions and beatings of detainees by guards at Lindela Repatriation Centre, assaults by police officers involved in the arrest of suspected illegal immigrants, and arbitrary and verbally abusive conduct towards asylum-seekers by Department of Home Affairs officials (Amnesty International, 2001). Xenophobia is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as ‘fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of what is strange or foreign’ (Mish, 1997). The literal meaning of the word suggests that xenophobic people would dislike all foreigners equally, as it is their ‘foreignness’ that makes them objectionable. However, the patterns that emerge of the targets involved in incidents that are attributed to xenophobia, as well as empirical research investigating xenophobia, suggest that this is not the case. Particular groups of foreigners are targeted, and the ethnic origins of...
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...|HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION | |INTRODUCTION | Humanitarian intervention poses a hard test for any international society built on principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, and the non-use of force. Immediately after the Holocaust, the society of states established laws prohibiting genocide, forbidding the mistreatment of civilians, and recognizing basic human rights. These humanitarian principles often conflict with principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. Sovereign states are expected to act as guardians of their citizens’ security, but what happens if states behave as criminals towards their own people, treating sovereignty as a licence to kill? Should tyrannical states be recognized as legitimate members of international society and accorded the protection afforded by the non-intervention principle? Or, should states forfeit their sovereign rights and be exposed to legitimate intervention if they actively abuse or fail to protect their citizens? Related to this, what responsibilities do other states or institutions have to enforce human rights norms against governments that massively violate them? Armed humanitarian intervention was not a legitimate practice during the cold war because states placed more...
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...David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up. Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street. It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances...
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...Outline Introduction: Where there is design, there is a designer. Thesis: G-d created the world in six days as described in the Book of Genesis, chapter one. Argument (point) #1: Apollo Argument (point) #2: The Cranium and the Brain Argument (point) #3: Hibernation: The bear Argument (point) #4: The painted turtle. The deer, the squirrel and the woodpecker: Conclusion: All societies since the creation of the world comprehend that acumen and intellect originate from a superior Intelligence. As described in Genesis chapter one, G-d created the world in six days. Does God Exist? Where there is design, there is a designer. Those who choose to disbelieve must twist their logic into pretzels in order to accommodate the misinformation they feed themselves. They expend endless energy positing the truth of their assertions to the rest of the world. In a sense, lack of faith is easier because it absolves the denier of any obligation, appreciation or indebtedness to The Creator. G-d created the world in six days as described in the Book of Genesis, chapter one. Frank observation by rational persons of any of the smallest quantifiable aspects of this ordered world will lead to the conclusion that there is a Creator. They can choose to examine a leaf, a gnat or a blood cell. “All roads lead home”. They must each draw the same conclusion. I have chosen examples from the human body and from nature that are but tiny illustrations of the glory, the profound intelligence...
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...17 Introduction While Arminians have through the years attempted to lay claims of exclusivity that theirs is the primary soteriological doctrine of the Southern Baptist Convention, history demonstrates otherwise and these assertions have a revisionist inflection that is in opposition to the autonomous nature of Southern Baptist congregations. It is not this papers intent to engage in the pros or cons of any given doctrine as it pertains to soteriology, but instead illustrate that what is seen by some as a modern incursion of Calvinism upon the Southern Baptist scene is in fact not without precedent and has a long standing tradition among many of this denominations most ardent practitioners. The Southern Baptist Convention is no stranger to controversy having in its 169 year history been at the center of disputes that have unfortunately at times led to division among its members and guided its course for generations. From the more recent inerrancy debates of the twentieth century to the schism of nineteenth century Landmarkism, Southern Baptists have shown themselves passionate about...
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