Rap And Violence Essays (2187 words) - African-American Culture

Rap And Violence _______________________________ _______________________________ Since the late 1980's rap music has been called the Anti Christ in our culture, because of it's so-called influence in people's life. People swear up and down that the music is why people, specially the youth resort to violent crimes. I think by saying this they are trying to cover up the real truth by giving simple answers. Rap is defined as a style of popular music consisting of improvised rhymes performed to a rhythmic accompaniment. The first rap song was made in the late 70's, the songs were seven to eight minutes long and was mostly used in small clubs to dance to. It didn't really become popular until the early 80's. Over the years it has become mainstream music, everyone is listening to it. In the last four years rap made up 60% of music bought in stores in the United States. In 1989 a local group called N.W.A.(Niggaz Wit Attitudes) came from out of L.A. and changed rap, which was the start of Gangsta Rap. In the ir lyrics they talked about crime, street violence and killing. Once they were a huge hit, it caught on, and really that's when all this madness started. Everyone started rapping Gangsta style. More and more people started rapping about police brutality and killing people and with that crime rose to high levels. In my opinion it's not the artists or the record company's fault that crime rose. It's not their responsibility to look after every person who listens to their music. In all these years of rap though there are three people who took the most criticism from the public. Dr. Dre was one, after N.W.A. broke up he went on to do his own thing, and after he released The Chronic he became a star. He took rap to a higher level where it never been before and I think that scared a lot of people. He was rapping about drive by's, having sex with hundreds of women, drinking alcohol all day and so on. By this time the crime rate was sky high and a lot of people where looking for easy answer s. It was mostly those few who just didn't like rap from the start that spoke out and tried to ban it. Most rappers loved the style Dr. Dre created, and so they tried to take the style and create something of their own. Along with Dr. Dre he helped a rising star Snoop Doggy Dog to become a big star by guest staring on his The Chronic album. Snoop released Doggy Style and it was a hit. His style similar to Dr. Dre made it a hit. It was his best-selling album to date. Congress tried every way they could to keep youth from listening to this music because they felt it was making them commit crimes. Snoop was charged not to long after his release for murder which he soon was found not guilty. They made a label for CD's and tapes that said Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics which actually in my opinion didn't do too much. This way parents could be aware of the type of music their kids listen to and could choose if they would like to allow them to listen to it. If you sit down and think abo ut it, when you buy a CD you by it because you want to listen to it, you don't really pay attention to that little label. Besides you see little kids no older then 11 walking around listening to Lil' Kim, Tupac, and all other rap artists cussing up a storm . . . what's with that? Why didn't the parents say anything about that, they have control over their children, yet critics and congress blame the rappers. The third man to take the most heat and who still continues to is Tupac Shakur. They say he was the best rapper alive and the most successful which I also believe is true. He has been in trouble with the law and public since his first album to even now after his death. He was arrested for numerous charges such as battery, attempted murder, and rape. In 1994 two 17-year-olds

Definition and Examples of Americanisms

Definition and Examples of Americanisms An Americanism is a word or phrase  (or, less commonly,  a feature of grammar, spelling, or pronunciation)  that (supposedly) originated in the United States or is used primarily by Americans. Americanism is often used as a term of disapproval, especially by non-American language mavens with little knowledge of historical linguistics. Many so-called Americanisms come from the English, Mark Twain accurately observed more than a century ago. [M]ost people suppose that everyone who guesses is a Yankee; the people who guess do so  because their ancestors guessed in Yorkshire.   The term Americanism was introduced by the Reverend John Witherspoon in the late-18th century. Examples and Observations [F]ew of the grammatical differences between British and American are great enough to produce confusion, and most are not stable because the two varieties are constantly influencing each other, with borrowing both ways across the Atlantic and nowadays via the Internet.(John Algeo, British or American English? Cambridge University Press, 2006)As pioneers, the first Americans had to make up many new words, some of which now seem absurdly commonplace. Lengthy, which dates back to 1689, is an early Americanism. So are calculate, seaboard, bookstore and presidential. . . . Antagonize and placate were both hated by British Victorians. As members of a multiracial society, the first Americans also adopted words like wigwam, pretzel, spook, depot and canyon, borrowing from the Indians, Germans, Dutch, French and Spanish.(Robert McCrum et al., The Story of English. Viking, 1986)Americanisms in British English- Most Americanisms coined [during the 19th century] havent stood the test of time. Wh en a woman disposes of an unwanted admirer we no longer say that she has given him the mitten. We still call experienced travellers globetrotters, but tend to say theyve bought the T-shirt rather than seen the elephant. We prefer more elegant metaphors for a cemetery than a bone-pit. Our dentists might object if we called them tooth carpenters. And if a teenager today told you theyd been shot in the neck you might ring for an ambulance rather than ask what theyd had to drink the previous night.Lots, however, have become part of our everyday speech. I guess, I reckon, keep your eyes peeled, it was a real eye-opener, easy as falling off a log, to go the whole hog, to get the hang of, struck oil, lame duck, face the music, high falutin, cocktail, and to pull the wool over ones eyes―all made the leap into British usage during the Victorian period. And theyve stayed there ever since.(Bob Nicholson, Racy Yankee Slang Has Long Invaded Our Language. The Guardian  [UK], Oct. 18, 201 0)- A list of fully assimilated English words and expressions that started life as American coinages or revivals would include antagonise, anyway, back-number (adjectival phrase), back yard (as in nimby), bath-robe, bumper (car), editorial (noun), fix up, just (quite, very, exactly), nervous (timid), peanut, placate, realise (see, understand), reckon, soft drink, transpire, washstand.In some cases, Americanisms have driven out a native equivalent or are in the process of doing so. For instance, in no particular order, ad has pretty well replaced advert as an abbreviation for advertisement, a press clipping is driving out cutting as a piece taken from a newspaper, a whole new ballgame, that is a metaphorical game of baseball, is what meets the harried circumspect eye where once a different kettle of fish or a horse of another color furnished the challenge, and someone quit his job where not so long ago he quitted it.Such matters probably indicate nothing more than minor, harmless lin guistic interchange, with a bias towards American modes of expression as likely to seem the livelier and (to adopt an Americanism) smarter alternative.(Kingsley Amis, The Kings English: A Guide to Modern Usage. HarperCollins, 1997) American and British CompoundsIn American English, the first noun [in a compound] is generally in the singular, as in drug problem, trade union, road policy, chemical plant. In British English, the first element is sometimes a plural noun, as in drugs problem, trades union, roads policy, chemicals plant. Some noun-noun compounds that entered American English at a very early stage are words for indigenous animals, like bullfrog a large American frog, groundhog a small rodent (also called woodchuck); for trees and plants, e.g. cottonwood (an American poplar tree); and for phenomena like log cabin, the kind of simple structure many early immigrants lived in. Sunup is also an early American coinage, parallel to the Americanism sundown, which is a synonym for the universal sunset.(Gunnel Tottie, An Introduction to American English. Wiley-Blackwell, 2002)Prejudice Against AmericanismsDocumenting the sustained prejudice  against American English over the past century and a half is not dif ficult since the only alteration in the complaint involves  the particular expressions that have come to the attention of the reviewers. So we will leap ahead to 21st century examples parallel to most of the complaints of the past.In 2010, the expressions targeted  for criticism included ahead of for before, face up confront, and fess up for confess (Kahn 2010). A counterargument has often been that these expressions are historically English, but the truths of historical linguistics are seldom persuasive or even seen as germane to the dispute. Americanisms are simply bad English in one way or another: slovenly, careless, or sloppy. . . . Reports like these seethe with disapproval.The same metaphors are used elsewhere in the English-speaking world. In Australia, new forms of language believed to derive from America are seen as a contagion: suffering the creeping American disease is a way to describe a situation the critic deplores (Money 2010). . . .The expressions that give rise to such complaints  are not such ordinary Americanisms as blood type, laser, or minibus. And some are not Americanisms at all.  They share the quality of being racy, informal, and perhaps a little subversive. They are usages that poke fun at pretense and gibe at gentility.(Richard W. Bailey, American English.  English Historical Linguistics, ed. by  Alexander Bergs. Walter de Gruyter, 2012) Passing PrejudicesThe playwright Mark Ravenhill recently tweeted irritably: Dear Guardian sub please dont allow passing. Here in Europe we die. Keep the horrible euphemism over the Atlantic. . . .Ravenhills . . . complaint about passing is that it is an Americanism, one that should be kept over the Atlantic by the verbal equivalent of a ballistic-missile shield, so as to preserve the saintly purity of our island tongue. The trouble with this is that its not actually an Americanism. In  Chaucers Squires Tale, the falcon says to the princess: Myn harm I wol confessen er I pace, meaning before it dies. In Shakespeares Henry VI Part 2, Salisbury says of the dying Cardinal: Disturbe him not, let him passe peaceably. In other words, the origin of this use of passing is firmly on this side of the Atlantic. Its as English as the word soccer―at first spelled socca or socker, as an abbreviation of association football.A lot of other supposed Americanisms arent Americanisms either. Its sometimes thought that transportation instead of the good old transport is an example of that annoying US habit of bolting on needless extra syllables to perfectly good words, but transportation is used in British English from 1540. Gotten as the past tense of got? English from 1380. Oftentimes? Its in the King James Bible.(Steven Poole, Americanisms Are Often Closer to Home Than We Imagine. The Guardian [UK], May 13, 2013) Americanisms in The Telegraph [U.K.]Some Americanisms keep slipping in, usually when we are given agency copy to re-write and do an inadequate job on it. There is no such verb as impacted, and other American-style usages of nouns as verbs should be avoided (authored, gifted etc). Maneuver is not spelt that way in Britain. We do not have lawmakers: we might just about have legislators, but better still we have parliament. People do not live in their hometown; they live in their home town, or even better the place where they were born.(Simon Heffer, Style Notes. The Telegraph, Aug. 2, 2010)

Try These Edible Fake Blood Recipes

Try These Edible Fake Blood Recipes What would Halloween be without blood? Fake blood can be expensive to buy, plus its not exactly edible, much less tasty. If youre going for the vampire look, you want blood you dont mind getting in your mouth. Otherwise, you might just want blood that you know is completely non-toxic. With those goals in mind, here are some recipes for realistic-looking edible fake blood. Please feel free to post a reply if you would like to share additional fake blood recipes. Fake Blood Cherry Flavor can of cherry pie filling8 ounces cream (softened) cheesewater Use a fork or spoon to remove the cherries from the pie filling.Mix together the pie filling gel with the cream cheese.Stir in a little water to achieve the desired consistency. Fake Blood Strawberry Flavor a packet of strawberry glaze8 ounces cream cheese (softened)red and blue food coloring Mix together the strawberry glaze and the cream cheese.Add a drop of red and a smaller amount of blue food coloring to achieve the desired color. Fake BloodSweetened, Unflavored 1/2 cup white corn syrup1 tablespoon cornstarch1/8 to 1/4 cup water15 drops red food coloring1-5 drops blue food coloring In a bowl, mix together the corn syrup and the cornstarch.Add water until the mixture is the consistency of blood.Mix in food coloring until you achieve the color of blood that you want. Note: If you use blue or green food coloring or one of the neon tints, you can make alien or insect blood using this recipe. Fake Blood Chocolate Flavored Sir red food coloring into the corn syrup until you have a deep red mixture.Add some cocoa powder or chocolate syrup to darken and thicken the fake blood.If the color still isnt deep enough, add a drop or more of blue food coloring.Stir in a bit of cornstarch if you want your blood to be thicker. corn syrupred and blue food coloringcocoa powder or chocolate syrupcornstarch (optional)

Benefits of American Aid to AIDS Patients in Third World Countries in Essay

Benefits of American Aid to AIDS Patients in Third World Countries in Africa - Essay Example This essay focuses on the health aid that the African developing countries benefit from, especially with respect to HIV/Aids. HIV/Aids is a pandemic due to the high number of people affected by the disease globally. The number of people who lose their lives due to HIV/Aids related complications is also high. This is the reason why the disease needs to be controlled. Although the disease has affected the whole world since its discovery in 1981, it is serious in third world countries mostly in Africa. Most of the developed nations are giving aid to African nations to fight the HIV/Aids scourge. The United States of America has been on the forefront in helping the African countries fight the disease. This paper aims to discuss the benefits of American aid for AIDS patients in third world countries that are mostly in Africa. In 2001, Bill Clinton confirmed the commitment that he had towards the availability of HIV/AIDS drugs. These negotiations, led to the reduction in prices of drugs fo r Africa and other poor regions. Importing policies from the United States were analyzed to ensure that most African countries could introduce the drugs needed. In conclusion, the researcher states that HIV/AIDS is one of the issues that make Africa as a continent lag behind in development. However, with the help that developing countries receive from the United States and other global organizations, the situation is better since there is hope for improvement in addressing HIV/Aids in the developing countries in Africa.

Health Promotion Proposal Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Health Promotion Proposal - Coursework Example They propose Nucleic acid amplification tests as preferred diagnostic tests performed on vaginal swabs or urine sample. They also recommend annual Chlamydia screening for all sexually active females under age 25. Department of Health: The New York State (2006) recommends the measures to prevent the spread of Chlamydia that include using a male or female condom, limiting number of sex partners and in case, one is exposed to infection he or she should avoid sexual contact and should visit the nearest a sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic, or doctor. It is advisable to bring sexual partner along with so that they can be examined for infection and if need be, given proper treatment. Chlamydia is a public health issue in Europe too because untreated Chlamydia may lead to poor reproductive outcomes in women. Chlamydia causes tubal infertility, ectopic pregnancy and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). Chlamydia is harmful to new born and may cause pneumonia and eye infections. It also facilitates the transmission of HIV. The cost of fertility treatment is high leading to in-vitro fertilization and tubal surgery. Controlling Chlamydia is challenging due to its asymptomatic nature; nevertheless, its prevention and control is possible through screening of target population and treatment (European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, 2009). The National Chlamydia Screening Program run by the department of health in the UK proposes to increase the testing regimen coverage from 25 % to 35 %. The evidence suggests that this will drastically reduce the prevalence of Chlamydia cases. Some estimates suggest that the program's past work has already reduced the prevalence by about 20 percent (Department of Health UK, 2011). Synthesis and Analysis Most literature across the globe agrees on certain aspects of Chlamydia infection. They all agree that its control is possible though concerted efforts are needed right from educating young adults on healthy sex activities; us ing male or female condom, especially when changing partners; and screening periodically the target population for infection. Screening is simple and can ascertain Chlamydia infection with reliability. Covering larger population for screening and treating them if found infected, can decrease the incidents of Chlamydia over time. Treatment is cost effective and the infected person needs to take medications only for a week or so to get completely rid of Chlamydia. The Theoretical Framework for Chlamydia Control It is important to note that currently, no vaccine is available to prevent Chlamydia infection. It is caused by bacteria called C. trachomatis and the most critical part is that it remains asymptomatic for months to years and thus infected person can transmit the disease without knowledge of anyone. Alternative ways of control are therefore necessary to prevent transmission of infection and sequelae. Screening for C. trachomatis in the target population becomes a necessary inte rvention to detect the infection. The theoretical framework for Chlamydia control thus lies within an ambit of widespread screening and subsequent treatment process through medications. Repeat Chlamydia infection may occur even after treatment process is over. Partner treatment, educating the patient and repeated testing become necessary

Illustrations of the text Essay Example for Free

Illustrations of the text Essay An impressive opening, a marvellous ending, an indifferent middle. Does this twentieth century comment represent to you a fair summary of Dr. Faustus? Support your views by detailed illustrations of the text. The narrative patterns of Dr. Faustus can be said to take on a loose, three-part structure, in which the first part involves the serious business of Faustus conjuring the devil, the middle involves trivial entertainment and the final section, in which the play reaches an intense poetic conclusion. It is arguable that compared to the high drama and passion evident at the beginning and end, the middle of the play has little to offer. However, despite the fact that in Faustus, Marlowe intended to portray the tragic downfall of a great man, he also included the apparently frivolous middle scenes for a specific purpose. The play opens with Faustus alone in his study, contemplating the direction in which he should take his future studies. This first speech is energetic and his words are those of a young man. As Faustus continues to reveal his dissatisfaction with the limits of human knowledge, rejecting each of the various scholarly disciplines available to him, the audience begin to become suspicious of his intentions. When Faustus proclaims that a greater subject fitteth [his] wit, and that the next step in his education must be necromancy, our worst fears are confirmed. It is important to note that whilst the modern audience may be only slightly shocked by this revelation, to Marlowes contemporaries it would have been horrifying in the extreme. In Elizabethan times, religion permeated all aspects of life, and the majority of people were devout Christians; such and explicit display of blasphemy would have been unheard of! The dramatic tension increases as the scene progresses, and Faustus arrogant proposal to try [his] brains to gain a deity confirms our opinion of him as a dangerous over-reacher. The entrance of the good and evil angels signals an opportunity for theatrical spectacle, which again helps maintain the tension of this impressive, dramatic opening scene. Faustus is seemingly unaware of these two characters (which perhaps suggests that they are rather states of mind than physical beings) but continues to rhapsodise on the varied ways he will use his power. Marlowe uses poetic language, and Faustus speech is more like a love song than a soliloquy: Ill have them ransack the ocean for orient pearl and search all corners of the new found world for pleasant fruits and princely delicacies. At this point, we are disturbed by Faustus behaviour; it is as though he is making extravagant promises to a beloved rather than seeking these things for himself. Faustus is eager to confer with his fellow scholars Valdes and Cornelius, who can be seen to represent the traditional tempters from earlier morality plays. Valdes astonishes the audience even further by promising that their satanic powers will canonise them. This implied holiness could not be further from the truth of their intentions. The first scene ends with Faustus feverishly impatient to conjure that very night. His last four words are dramatic and fearsome in the recklessness: this night Ill conjure, therefore I die. The contemporary audience, who would have believed in the immortal soul, would have been aware of the terrifying fact that if he were to die in the process of conjuring, he would spend an eternity in hell. Soon after, we meet Faustus again. The scene is pitch black and he has prepared a circle in which to conjure, and some kind of sacrifice. Marlowe uses atmospheric language such as the gloomy shadow of the earth and her pitchy breath, to evoke the tension and drama. This would have been particularly important for the Elizabethan audience who had to rely on their imaginations during the performance, rather than special effects. Faustus invocation is in Latin, which sounds powerful and sonorous. He uses a frightening mixture of the orthodox and the demonic, for example sprinkling the holy water whilst conjuring. All this convinces us that he is engaged in an extremely perilous undertaking. Some time later, once Faustus has conjured Mephastophilis, he must sign a contract which states that Satan can have his soul in exchange for 24 good years. From this point onwards tension mounts and actions follow in rapid succession until the end of the scene. Faustus must sign in blood, yet when he tries to do so it congeals, forcing Mephastophilis to go and fetch a chafer of hot coal to melt it again. This episode contributed greatly to the dramatic tension of the scene. The congealing of the blood is part literal, but part metaphorical in the sense that it is Faustus own body recoiling from the deed he is about to commit. The simple bringing of the coals in the smoking dish is also quite dramatic. The sight and smell of the flames remind the audience (and should remind Faustus) of the fact that the contract will result in his damnation in hell. The episode ends with Faustus proclamation consummatum est once he has signed. This startling blasphemy echoes Christs final words on the cross and Faustus is ironically identified with him. It is arguable that the impressive opening of the play and the dramatic scenes which follow soon after are balanced and complimented by its equally intense ending. Faustus encounters the old man when his 24 years are almost over, which signals that there is hope for his salvation, even at this late stage. It is important that the audience can still relate to Faustus and fell that he is able to make conscious decisions about his fate, all be they the wrong ones. Whilst we continue to be thus engaged with Faustus, every move he makes in this scene creates high tension and greatly enhances the dramatic quality. About half way through the scene, we witness Mephastophilis providing a desperate Faustus with a dagger to kill himself (suicide being an offence to heaven and an appropriate means of getting to hell). Although the old man talks him out of it, the audience is still wracked with suspense, particularly whilst witnessing Faustus ponder feverishly as hell strives with grace for conquest in [his] breast. However, Faustus soon reverts to his former, cowardly self when Mephastophilis threatens to tear his flesh. He instructs sweet Mephastophilis to punish the old man instead, ignoring his conviction that my faith, vile hell, shall triumph over thee. Following this episode, Faustus asks for Helen of Troy as his paramour, and speaks to her, where he advised the scholars strictly not to. We feel that Faustus must realise he has made a fatal choice -he knows that the image he sees before him is a spirit- and watch in compelling revulsion as he kisses the devil. The speech he makes is a rhapsodic love poem, which is stunning when we consider the harsh theatrical contrast between Faustus words (e. g. O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars) and the sight of the old mans flesh being torn to pieces on stage. Even more horrifying is the way in which the brilliant scholar uses the language of love poetry to damn himself, and yet the lyrical beauty of the verse remains. When he says her lips suck forth my soul, Faustus is not only using a rapturous metaphor: it is actually happening! By now, the tragedy is inevitable; Faustus has rejected all hope of salvation, and the audience wait for his impending doom with trepidation. The final scene, in which we witness Faustus death is both memorable and moving. His solitude at the end of the play compliments his solitude at the beginning, and the fact that he struggles alone maintains the dramatic tension right up until he is taken to hell. Marlowe purposefully ends the play with Faustus soliloquy, to vocalise his inner thought and emotional condition. His terror, frantic hopes and despair are all enhanced by the soliloquy, which gains dramatic power by its graphic, physical nature. In his fervour, Faustus actually tries to leap up to [his] God, but fails to do so because some infernal force pulls him down. It is a very tragic scene, particularly as Faustus in his desperation tries to conjure and command the earth to gape open but realises that o no, it will not harbour me. There is a poignant contrast between the disillusioned scholar we see here and the successful conjurer of the previous scenes. When the clock strikes to signal his final half hour, Faustus bargains frantically with God to let him live for a hundred, or even a thousand years in hell but still be saved. Upon the arrival of the devils he is seized by fear and panic, willing his soul to be changed into little water drops and imploring God to look not so fierce in him. His final desperate plea Ill burn my books is deeply moving considering the futile nature of the gesture. Whilst the tension of the final scenes is obvious, without some of the light-hearted episodes which precede it, much of the dramatic quality would be lost. For this reason, Marlowe includes a number of comic scenes to relieve some of the suspense during the middle section of the play. As well as providing entertainment and an opportunity for spectacle (for example, the slapstick comedy of the Pope scene, and the grotesque rhetoric of the seven deadly sins) these scenes also have several important points to make. A good example of this happens fairly early on in the play, where Wagner procures one of Faustus books and persuades the flea-ridden clown to become his servant. Marlowe is making the point that whilst these two characters may be banal and frivolous, they are just as capable of conjuring as Faustus! Wagner apparently has just as much success without selling his soul for the privilege. They also draw our attention to the contract which Faustus is about to make. When Wagner says that the clown would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it were blood raw, we note that Faustus proposed contract amounts to something of similar value (i. e. it will gain him nothing). In this scene, conjuring is de-based so that even the illiterate clown is taught how to use black magic. This contrast with Faustus great learning demonstrates how little intellect really is needed for such pursuits. We soon witness a scene between another two comic characters, Robin the ostler, and his companion, Rafe. Robin has stolen one of Faustus books and wishes to use it to gain sexual experience. Whilst this amuses the audience, we are also reminded to reflect on the unfolding tragedy. Whilst the ostlers may be venturing in too deep, they are innocents and their desires amount to little more than a few silly capers. When we compare this to Faustus feverish necessity to push the boundaries of human knowledge we become aware of just how dangerous the situation is. As Faustus begins to age, he too appears to become aware of the consequences of his actions. The amusing trick he plays on the horse-courser in scene ten plunges him into a despondant mood, forcing him to reflect upon his fate. He is now using his powers on even lower forms of entertainment than he did by making a mockery of the Pope in scene seven. He realises that he has done nothing special and is yet but a man, which is enforced by the horse-coursers callous assumption that he is a horse doctor. In Elizabethan times, such a profession would not have been highly respected, and Faustus is outraged that this is how he is being perceived. In conclusion, I would say that although the main dramatic events of the play occur either at the beginning or at the end, the middle scenes also have value and interest. Whilst Marlowes main intention for the comic scenes was to provide amusement for the audience and some respite from the tension of the main plot, they also contribute significantly to some of the main themes of the play by comparing Faustus behaviour to that of his contemporaries, and thus drawing our attention to the gravity of his actions.

Billy Budd Essay: Moral Shades of Grey -- Billy Budd Essays

Moral Shades of Grey in Billy Budd    Vere's decision, according to the Wartime Acts under which he was subject, was lawfully justified. To do anything else would be a direct violation of the law, and thus, the position in which he was placed. The captain could not follow any twinge of conscience that he felt, for it was not his position to do so. As Vere put it, "But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King." He and the judges were forced to follow their duty, which was to carry out the law. As officers of such a law, the morality of the decision was not their choice, as that same law dictated what they were to choose. The decision fell finally to Vere as he gave the speech which condemned Billy. "Our vowed responsibility is in this: That however pitiless that law may operate, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it." This was, however, not the only factor to be looked after. What options they had does not dictate the morality of an act, it is only one part of a larger whole. Law is, in itself, morality, by nature of the fact that to defy law results in chaos. Originally the law was created to serve as a means of carrying out Justice, but the sheer nature of the fact that it has since, as in this case, acted in some way other than to uphold such a concept proves that it is a separate entity unto itself. Rather than considering the morality of a decision in the administering of Justice, it is now reasonable and required to consider the law as a factor in determining the morality of a decision. When the virtue of the decision is determined, then can Justice, and thus punishment, be considered. It is important to understand this concept: law is no longer a means of carry... ... choice, his decision is justified. Justification is as close to virtue as can be expected in this case. Life is not black and white, as theories of morality would dictate, but merely a complex set of shades of grey. Vere's final choice was only the highlights on a painting, the end of a process, and the selection among a set of distasteful colors on a palette of grey. Works Cited and Consulted: Chase, Richard. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1971. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Ed. Frederick Busch. New York: Penguin, 1986. Richards, Lawrence O. The Bible Reader's Companion. Wheaton: SP Publications, Inc., 1991. Stern, Milton R. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1968. The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Dallas: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1979.

Cultural Event Report

Cultural Event Report: Attending a Performance Jessica Brown Professor Lafferty Hum 111: World Cultures I September 5, 2012 Event Name: Beauty & the Beast Musical Event Date & Time: August 10, 2012 Event Location: James F. Dean Theatre, Summerville, SC For this cultural event report I decided to attend a musical performance. This was a play of the classic movie Beauty and the Beast. This is the first time I have ever attended a live musical and I had an overall good experience.The one thing that I don’t really like is a lot of singing but the acting was extraordinary. The cast was dressed in beautiful brightly colored costumes. The main characters of course were Belle, the Beast, Gaston, and Belle’s father, Maurice. The main thing I did throughout the play was compare it to the actual movie and there were differences but the main plot was the same. I attended the performance with my sister, my kids, and my niece. The kids really enjoyed it, especially the talking teapot s!My first impression when entering the theatre was that it was rather small which I expected. The tickets were only $6. 00 for students and children under 3 were free. All the seats were full also. I didn’t really expect people to dress up in nice clothes, and everyone just had on mostly jeans and shirt, nothing fancy. The lighting was good on the stage and I could hear the cast loud and clearly through the speakers. One thing that I didn’t like was the microphones that the cast used.They were rather large and it would have been nicer for them to have a microphone that was a little less revealed. There were about 15-20 cast members in all. Some people seemed to look a bit more comfortable on stage than others. The effect on the stage, while they were singing, was great. My favorite part was in the beginning when the Prince was turned into the beast because he was turning down the woman who turned out to be a beautiful enchantress. It was a good lesson of karma and how true beauty is within and it’s not always about what’s on the outside.The crowd was very respectful to the performers by being quiet during the show. There was a small intermission of about 20 minutes. The play lasted a total of 2 hours. During the intermission there was a small concession stand that had candy, drinks, and popcorn. The show proceeded shortly after. During the part of the performance when Gaston and the Beast are fighting Gaston does stab him. It was kind of sad when Belle thought the beast was dead, but then he transformed back into the Prince.It was a happy ending and the final song was amazing. The singers had very beautiful voices. After going to this performance it makes when want to go see another one to compare and contrast each aspect. I would like to go see a drama written by Shakespeare. It would be a great experience to see actors portray people from a different era. While watching this musical I also thought of movies that involve the same issues, such as the Princess and the Frog and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.When the show had ended the performers were each introduced as they came back onto the stage. Also, we were able to meet and greet with them before we left. The briefly discussed their history with acting and singing and how long it took them to prepare for the show. Everything about the performance was good and they knew how to keep the audience’s attention which is important. I am glad that I was able to attend the show. References Beauty and the Beast, the Musical. James F. Dean Theatre, Summerville, SC. August 10, 2012. Live Performance

Historiographic Metafiction Essay

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. -Foucault What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. In fiction this means that it is usually metafiction that is equated with the postmodern. Given the scarcity of precise definitions of this problematic period designation, such an equation is often accepted without question. What I would like to argue is that, in the interests of precision and consistency, we must add something else to this definition: an equally self-conscious dimension of history. My model here is postmodern architecture, that resolutely parodic recalling of the history of architectural forms and functions. The theme of the 1980 Venice Biennale, which introduced postmodernism to the architectural world, was â€Å"The Presence of the Past. † The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it â€Å"historiographic metafiction. † The category of novel I am thinking of includes One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ragtime, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Name of the Rose. All of these are popular and familiar novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their implicit claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least. 3 LINDA HUTCHEON In the wake of recent assaults by literary and philosophical theory on modernist formalist closure, postmodern American fiction, in particular, has sought to open itself up to history, to what Edward Said (The World) calls the â€Å"world. † But it seems to have found that it can no longer do so in any innocent way: the certainty of direct reference of the historical novel or even the nonfictional novel is gone. So is the certainty of self-reference implied in the Borgesian claim that both literature and the world are equally fictive realities. The postmodern relationship between fiction and history is an even more complex one of interaction and mutual implication. Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the â€Å"world† and literature. The textual incorporation of these intertextual past(s) as a constitutive structural element of postmodernist fiction functions as a formal marking of historicity-both literary and â€Å"worldly. † At first glance it would appear that it is only its constant ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity that distinguishes postmodern parody from medieval and Renaissance imitation (see Greene 17). For Dante, as for E. L. Doctorow, the texts of literature and those of history are equally fair game. Nevertheless, a distinction should be made: â€Å"Traditionally, stories were stolen, as Chaucer stole his; or they were felt to be the common property of a culture or community †¦ These notable happenings, imagined or real, lay outside language the way history itself is supposed to, in a condition of pure occurrence† (Gass 147). Today, there is a return to the idea of a common discursive â€Å"property† in the embedding of both literary and historical texts in fiction, but it is a return made problematic by overtly metafictional assertions of both history and literature as human constructs, indeed, as human illusions-necessary, but none the less illusory for all that. The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction enacts, in a way, the views of certain contemporary historiographers (see Canary and Kozicki): it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this is a past that can only be known from its texts, its traces-be they literary or historical. Clearly, then, what I want to call postmodernism is a paradoxical cultural phenomenon, and it is also one that operates across many traditional disciplines. In contemporary theoretical discourse, for instance, we find puzzling contradictions: those masterful denials of mastery, totalizing negations of totalization, continuous attest4 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION ings of discontinuity. In the postmodern novel the conventions of both fiction and historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and subverted, asserted and denied. And the double (literary/historical) nature of this intertextual parody is one of the major means by which this paradoxical (and defining) nature of postmodernism is textually inscribed. Perhaps one of the reasons why there has been such heated debate on the definition of postmodernism recently is that the implications of the doubleness of this parodic process have not been fully examined. Novels like The Book of Daniel or The Public Burning-whatever their complex intertextual layering-can certainly not be said to eschew history, any more than they can be said to ignore either their moorings in social reality (see Graff 209) or a clear political intent (see Eagleton 61). Historiographic metafiction manages to satisfy such a desire for â€Å"worldly† grounding while at the same time querying the very basis of the authority of that grounding. As David Lodge has put it, postmodernism short-circuits the gap between text and world (239-4 0 ) . Discussions of postmodernism seem more prone than most to confusing self-contradictions, again perhaps because of the paradoxical nature of the subject itself. Charles Newman, for instance, in his provocative book The Post-Modern Aura, begins by defining postmodern art as a â€Å"commentary on the aesthetic history of whatever genre it adopts† (44). This would, then, be art which sees history only in aesthetic terms (57). However, when postulating an American version of postmodernism, he abandons this metafictional intertextual definition to call American literature a â€Å"literature without primary influences,† â€Å"a literature which lacks a known parenthood,† suffering from the â€Å"anxiety of non-influence† (87). As we shall see, an examination of the novels of Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, and others casts a reasonable doubt on such pronouncements. On the one hand, Newman wants to argue that  postmodernism at large is resolutely parodic; on the other, he asserts that the American postmodern deliberately puts â€Å"distance between itself and its literary antecedents, an obligatory if occasionally conscience-stricken break with the past† (172). Newman is not alone in his viewing of postmodern parody as a form of ironic rupture with the past (see Thiher 214), but, as in postmodernist architecture, there is always a paradox at the heart of that â€Å"post†: irony does indeed mark the difference from the past, but the intertextual echoing simultaneously works to affirm-textually and hermeneutically-the connection with the past. When that past is the literary period we now seem to label as 5 LINDA HUTCHEON modernism, then what is both instated and then subverted is the notion of the work of art as a closed, self-sufficient, autonomous object deriving its unity from the formal interrelations of its parts. In its characteristic attempt to retain aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the â€Å"world,† postmodernism both asserts and then undercuts this formalistic view. But this does not necessitate a return to the world of â€Å"ordinary reality,† as some have argued (Kern 216); the â€Å"world† in which the text situates itself is the â€Å"world† of discourse, the â€Å"world† of texts and intertexts. This â€Å"world† has direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that empirical reality. It is a contemporary critical truism that realism is really a set of conventions, that the representation of the real is not the same as the real itself. What historiographic metafiction challenges is both any naive realist concept of representation and any equally naive textualist or formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world. The postmodern is selfconsciously art â€Å"within the archive† (Foucault 92), and that archive is both historical and literary. In the light of the work of writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, D. M. Thomas,John Fowles, Umberto Eco, as well as Robert Coover, E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Joseph Heller, Ishmael Reed, and other American novelists, it is hard to see why critics such as Allen Thiher, for instance, â€Å"can think of no such intertextual foundations today† as those of Dante in Virgil (189)’ Are we really in the midst of a crisis of faith in the â€Å"possibility of historical culture† (189)? Have we ever not been in such a crisis? To parody is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it. And this is the postmodern paradox. The theoretical exploration of the â€Å"vast dialogue† (Calinescu, 169) between and among literatures and histories that configure postmodernism has, in part, been made possible by Julia Kristeva’s early reworking of the Bakhtinian notions of polyphony, dialogism, and heteroglossia-the multiple voicings of a text. Out of these ideas she developed a more strictly formalist theory of the irreducible plurality of texts within and behind any given text, thereby deflecting the critical focus away from the notion of the subject (here, the author) to the idea of textual productivity. Kristeva and her colleagues at Tel Quel in the late sixties and early seventies mounted a collective attack on the founding subject (alias: the â€Å"romantic† cliche of the author) as the original and originating source of fixed and fetishized meaning in the text. And, of course, this also put into question the entire notion of the â€Å"text† as an autonomous entity, with immanent meaning. 6 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION In America a similar formalist impulse had provoked a similar attack much earlier in the form of the New Critical rejection of the â€Å"intentional fallacy† (Wimsatt). Nevertheless, it would seem that even though we can no longer talk comfortably of authors (and sources and influences), we still need a critical language in which to discuss those ironic allusions, those re-contextualized quotations, those double-edged parodies both of genre and of specific works that proliferate in modernist and postmodernist texts. This, of course, is where the concept of intertextuality has proved so useful. As later defined by Roland Barthes (Image 160) and Michael Riffaterre (142-43), intertextuality replaces the challenged authortext relationship with one between reader and text, one that situates the locus of textual meaning within the history of discourse itself. A literary work can actually no longer be considered original; if it were, it could have no meaning for its reader. It is only as part of prior discourses that any text derives meaning and significance. Not surprisingly, this theoretical  redefining of aesthetic value has coincided with a change in the kind of art being produced. Postmodernly parodic composer George Rochberg, in the liner notes to the Nonesuch recording of his String Quartet no. 3 articulates this change in these terms: â€Å"I have had to abandon the notion of ‘originality,’ in which the personal style of the artist and his ego are the supreme values; the pursuit of the one-idea, uni-dimensional work and gesture which seems to have dominated the esthetics of art in the aoth century; and the received idea that it is necessary to divorce oneself from the past. â€Å"In the visual arts too, the works of Shusaku Arakawa, Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselman, and others have brought about, through parodic intertextuality (both aesthetic and historical), a real skewing of any â€Å"romantic† notions of subjectivity and creativity. As in historiographic metafiction, these other art forms parodically cite the intertexts of both the â€Å"world† and art and, in so doing, contest the boundaries that many would unquestioningly use to separate the two. In its most extreme formulation, the result of such contesting would be a â€Å"break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable† (Derrida 185). While postmodernism, as I am defining it here, is perhaps somewhat less promiscuously extensive, the notion of parody as opening the text up, rather than closing it down, is an important one: among the many things that postmodern intertextuality challenges are both closure and single, centralized meaning. Its willed and willful provisionality rests largely upon its acceptance of the inevitable textual infiltration of prior discursive 7 LINDA HUTCHEON practices. Typically contradictory, intertextuality in postmodern art both provides and undermines context. In Vincent B. Leitch’s terms, it â€Å"posits both an uncentered historical enclosure and an abysmal decentered foundation for language and textuality; in so doing, it exposes all contextualizations as limited and limiting, arbitrary and confining, self-serving and authoritarian, theological and political. However paradoxically formulated,  intertextuality offers a liberating determinism† (162). It is perhaps clearer now why it has been claimed that to use the term intertextuality in criticism is not just to avail oneself of a useful conceptual tool: it also signals a â€Å"prise de position, un champ de reference† (Angenot 122). But its usefulness as a theoreticalframework that is both hermeneutic and formalist is obvious in dealing with historiographic metafiction that demands of the reader not only the recognition of textualized traces of the literary and historical past but also the awareness of what has been done-through irony-to those traces. The reader is forced to acknowledge not only the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past, but also both the value and the limitation of that inescapably discursive form of knowledge, situated as it is â€Å"between presence and absence† (Barilli). halo Calvina’s Marco Polo in Invisible Cities both is and is not the historical Marco Polo. How can we, today, â€Å"know† the Italian explorer? We can only do so by way of texts-including his own (Il Milione) , from which Calvino parodically takes his frame tale, his travel plot, and his characterization (Musarra 141). Roland Barthes once defined the intertext as â€Å"the impossibility of living outside the infinite text† (Pleasure 36), thereby making intertextuality the very condition of textuality. Umberto Eco, writing of his novel The Name of the Rose, claims: â€Å"1 discovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told† (20). The stories that The Name of the Rose retells are both those of literature (by Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, among others) and those of history (medieval chronicles, religious testimonies). This is the parodically doubled discourse of postmodernist intertextuality. However, this is not just a doubly introverted form of aestheticism: the theoretical implications of this kind of historiographic metafiction coincide with recent historiographic theory about the nature of history writing as narrativization (rather than representation) of the past and about the nature of the archive as the textualized remains of history (see White, â€Å"The Question†). 8 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION In other words, yes, postmodernism manifests a certain introversion, a self-conscious turning toward the form of the act of writing itself; but it is also much more than that. It does not go so far as to â€Å"establish an explicit literal relation with that real world beyond itself,† as some have claimed (Kirernidjian 238). Its relationship to the â€Å"worldly† is still on the level of discourse, but to claim that is to claim quite a lot. After all, we can only â€Å"know† (as opposed to â€Å"experience†) the world through our narratives (past and present) of it, or so postmodernism argues. The present, as well as the past, is always already irremediably textualized for us (Belsey 46), and the overt intertextuality of historiographic metafiction serves as one of the textual signals of this postmodern realization. Readers of a novel like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five do not have to proceed very far before picking up these signals. The author is identified on the title page as â€Å"a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace. † The character, Kurt Vonnegut, appears in the novel, trying to erase his memories of the war and of Dresden, the destruction of which he saw from â€Å"Slaughterhouse-Five,† where he worked as a POW. The novel itself opens with: â€Å"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true† (7). Counterpointed to this historical context, however, is the (metafictionally marked) Billy Pilgrim, the optometrist who helps correct defective vision-including his own, though it takes the planet Tralfamadore to give him his new perspective. Billy’s fantasy life acts as an allegory of the author’s own displacements and postponements (i. e. , his other novels) that prevented him from writing about Dresden before this, and it is the intratexts of the novel that signal this allegory: Tralfamadore itself is from Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, Billy’s home in Illium is from Player Piano, characters appear from Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The intertexts, however, function in similar ways, and their provenience is again double: there are actual historical intertexts (documentaries on Dresden, etc.), mixed with those of historical fiction (Stephen Crane, Celine). But there are also structurally and thematically connected allusions: to Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East and to various works of science fiction. Popular 9 LINDA HUTCHEON and high-art intertexts mingle: Valley of the Dolls meets the poems of William Blake and Theodore Roethke. All are fair game and all get re-contextualized in order to challenge the imperialistic (cultural and political) mentalities that bring about the Dresdens of history. Thomas Pynchon’s V. uses double intertexts in a similarly â€Å"loaded† fashion to formally enact the author’s related theme of the entropic destructiveness of humanity. Stencil’s dossier, its fragments of the texts of history, is an amalgam of literary intertexts, as if to remind us that â€Å"there is no one writable ‘truth’ about history and experience, only a series of versions: it always comes to us ‘stencillized'† (Tanner 172). And it is always multiple, like V’s identity. Patricia Waugh notes that metafiction such as Slaughterhouse-Five or The Public Burning â€Å"suggests not only that writing history is a fictional act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design† (48-49). Historiographic metafiction is particularly doubled, like this, in its inscribing of both historical and literary intertexts. Its specific and general recollections of the forms and contents of history writing work to familiarize the unfamiliar through (very familiar) narrative structures (as Hayden White has argued [â€Å"The Historical Text,† 49-50]), but its metafictional selfreflexivity works to render problematic any such familiarization. And the reason for the sameness is that both real and imagined worlds come to us through their accounts of them, that is, through their traces, their texts. The ontological line between historical past and literature is not effaced (see Thiher 190), but underlined. The past really did exist, but we can only â€Å"know† that past today through its texts, and therein lies its connection to the literary. If the discipline of history has lost its privileged status as the purveyor of truth, then so much the better, according to this kind of modern historiographic theory: the loss of the illusion of transparency in historical writing is a step toward intellectual self-awareness that is matched by metafiction’s challenges to the presumed transparency of the language of realist texts. When its critics attack postmodernism for being what they see as ahistorical (as do Eagleton, Jameson, and Newman), what is being referred to as â€Å"postrnodern† suddenly becomes unclear, for surely historiographic metafiction, like postmodernist architecture and painting, is overtly and resolutely historical-though, admittedly, in an ironic and problematic way that acknowledges that history is not the transparent record of any sure â€Å"truth. † Instead, such fiction 10. HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION corroborates the views of philosophers of history such as Dominick LaCapra who argue that â€Å"the past arrives in the form of texts and textualized remainders-memories, reports, published writings, archives, monuments, and so forth† (128) and that these texts interact with one another in complex ways. This does not in any way deny the value of history-writing; it merely redefines the conditions of value in somewhat less imperialistic terms. Lately, the tradition of narrative history with its concern â€Å"for the short time span, for the individual and the event† (Braudel 27), has been called into question by the Annales School in France. But this particular model of narrative history was, of course, also that of the realist novel. Historiographic metafiction, therefore, represents a challenging of the (related) conventional forms of fiction and history through its acknowledgment of their inescapable textuality. As Barthes once remarked, Bouvard and Pecuchet become the ideal precursors of the postmodernist writer who â€Å"can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them† (Irnage 146). The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the  scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these. Or, if it is seen as a limitation-restricted to the always already narrated-this tends to be made into the primary value, as it is in Lyotard’s â€Å"pagan vision,† wherein no one ever manages to be the first to narrate anything, to be the origin of even her or his own narrative (78). Lyotard deliberately sets up this â€Å"limitation† as the opposite of what he calls the capitalist position of the writer as original creator, proprietor, and entrepreneur of her or his story. Much postmodern writing shares this implied ideological critique of the assumptions underlying â€Å"romantic† concepts of author and text, and it is parodic intertextuality that is the major vehicle of that critique. Perhaps because parody itself has potentially contradictory ideological implications (as â€Å"authorized transgression,† it can be seen as both conservative and revolutionary [Hutcheon 69-83]), it is a perfect mode of criticism for postmodernism, itself paradoxical in its conservative installing and then radical contesting of conventions. Historiographic metafictions, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drurn, or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (which uses both of the former as intertexts), employ parody not only to restore history and memory in the face of the distortions of the â€Å"history of forgetting† (Thiher 11 LINDA HUTCHEON 202), but also, at the same time, to put into question the authority of any act of writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality. When linked with satire, as in the work of Vonnegut, V. Vampilov, Christa Wolf, or Coover, parody can certainly take on more precisely ideological dimensions. Here, too, however, there is no direct intervention in the world: this is writing working through other writing, other textualizations of experience (Said Beginnings 237). In many cases intertextuality may well be too limited a term to describe this process; interdiscursivity would perhaps be a more accurate term for the collective modes of discourse from which the postmodern parodically draws: literature, visual arts, history, biography, theory, philosophy,  psychoanalysis, sociology, and the list could go on. One of the effects of this discursive pluralizing is that the (perhaps illusory but once firm and single) center of both historical and fictive narrative is dispersed. Margins and edges gain new value. The â€Å"ex-centric†-as both off-center and de-centeredgets attention. That which is â€Å"different† is valorized in opposition both to elitist, alienated â€Å"otherness† and also to the uniformizing impulse of mass culture. And in American postmodernism, the â€Å"different† comes to be defined in particularizing terms such as those of nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Intertextual parody of canonical classics is one mode of reappropriating and reformulating-with significant changes-the dominant white, male, middle-class, European culture. It does not reject it, for it cannot. It signals its dependence by its use of the canon, but asserts its rebellion through ironic abuse of it. As Edward Said has been arguing recently (â€Å"Culture†), there is a relationship of mutual interdependence between the histories of the dominators and the dominated. American fiction since the sixties has been, as described by Malcolm Bradbury (186), particularly obsessed with its own pastliterary, social, and historical. Perhaps this preoccupation is (or was) tied in part to a need to fmd a particularly American voice within a culturally dominant Eurocentric tradition (D’haen 216). The United States (like the rest of North and South America) is a land of immigration. In E. L. Doctorow’s words, â€Å"We derive enormously, of course, from Europe, and that’s part of what Ragtime is about: the means by which we began literally, physically to lift European art and architecture and bring it over here† (in Trenner 58). This is also part of what American historiographic metafiction in general is â€Å"about. † Critics have discussed at length the parodic 12 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION intertexts of the work of Thomas Pynchon, including Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness (McHale 88) and Proust’s first-person confessional form (Patteson 37-38) in V. In particular, The Crying of Lot 49 has been seen as directly linking the literary parody ofJacobean drama with the selectivity and subjectivity of what we deem historical â€Å"fact† (Bennett). Here the postmodern parody operates in much the same way as it did in the literature of the seventeenth century, and in both Pynchon’s novel and the plays he parodies (John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, and Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, among others), the intertextual â€Å"received discourse† is firmly embedded in a social commentary about the loss of relevance of traditional values in contemporary life (Bennett). Just as powerful and even more outrageous, perhaps, is the parody of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos, where political satire and parody meet to attack white Euro-centered ideologies of domination. Its structure of â€Å"A Past Christmas† and â€Å"A Future Christmas† prepares us for its initial Dickensian invocations-first through metaphor (â€Å"Money is as tight as Scrooge† [4]) and then directly: â€Å"Ebenezer Scrooge towers above the Washington skyline, rubbing his hands and greedily peering over his spectacles† (4). Scrooge is not a character, but a guiding spirit of 1980 America, one that attends the inauguration of the president that year. The novel proceeds to update Dickens’ tale. However, the rich are still cozy and comfortable (â€Å"Regardless of how high inflation remains, the wealthy will have any kind of Christmas they desire, a spokesman for Neiman-Marcus announces† [5]); the poor are not. This is the 1980 replay of â€Å"Scrooge’s winter, ‘as mean as ajunkyard dog† (32). The â€Å"Future Christmas† takes place after monopoly capitalism has literally captured Christmas following a court decision which has granted exclusive rights to Santa Claus to one person and one company. One strand of the complex plot continues the Dickensian intertext: the American president-a vacuous, alcoholic, ex-(male) model-is reformed by a visit from St. Nicholas, who takes him on a trip through hell, playing Virgil to his Dante. There he meets past presidents and other politicians, whose punishments (as in the Inferno) conform to their crimes. Made a new man from this experience, the president spends Christmas Day with his black butler, John, and John’S crippled grandson. Though unnamed, this Tiny Tim ironically outsentimentalizes Dickens’: he has a leg amputated; he is black; his parents died in a car accident. In an attempt to save the nation, the president goes on televi13 LINDA HUTCHEON sian to announce: â€Å"The problems of American society will not go away †¦ by invoking Scroogelike attitudes against the poor or saying humbug to the old and to the underprivileged† (158). But the final echoes of the Dickens intertext are ultimately ironic: the president is declared unfit to serve (because of his televised message) and is hospitalized by the business interests which really run the government. None of Dickens’ optimism remains in this bleak satiric vision of the future. Similarly, in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Reed parodically inverts Dostoevsky’s â€Å"Grand Inquisitor† in order to subvert the authority of social, moral, and literary order. No work of the Western humanist tradition seems safe from postmodern intertextual citation and contestation today: in Heller’s God Knows even the sacred texts of the Bible are subject to both validation and demystification. It is significant that the intertexts ofJohn Barth’s LETTERS include not only the British eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Don Quixote, and other European works by H. G. Wells, Mann, and Joyce, but also texts by Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper. The specifically American past is as much a part of defining â€Å"difference† for contemporary American postmodernism as is the European past. The same parodic mix of authority and transgression, use and abuse characterizes intra-American intertextuality. For instance, Pynchon’s V. and Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in different ways, parody both the structures and theme of the recoverability of history in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Similarly, Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets (1984) both installs and subverts Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (Levine 80). The parodic references to the earlier, nineteenth-century or classic American literature are perhaps even more complex, however, since there is a long (and related) tradition of the interaction of fiction and history in, for example, Hawthorne’s use of the conventions of romance to connect the historical past and the writing present. And indeed Hawthorne’s fiction is a familiar postmodern intertext: The Blithedale Romance and Barth’s The Floating Opera share the same moral preoccupation with the consequences of writers taking aesthetic distance from life, but it is the difference in their structural forms (Barth’s novel is more self-consciously metafictional [Christensen 12]) that points the reader to the real irony of the conjunction of the ethical issue. The canonical texts of the American tradition are both undermined and yet drawn upon, for parody is the paradoxical postmodern way of coming to terms with the past.

Writing a Platinum Tier Argumentative Essay on Air Pollution

Writing a Platinum Tier Argumentative Essay on Air Pollution There are certain situations when writing an essay could be fun for the writer and the reader. In most of these situations, you either enjoy writing because you have a vested interest in the subject matter to be discussed or you have been given a chance to dispute someone else’s claim by making a superior argument. And writing a platinum tier argumentative essay falls into this category. In this article, the best way to go about writing an argumentative essay will be discussed to help you fine-tune your arguments using a clear and precise format to get your message across. To do this, four steps will be used to explain the process required to excellently go from introduction to your concluding paragraphs with professionalism your essay deserves. The Introduction When writing an argumentative essay, your introduction serves as a window into your thought process as well as what you plan to discuss in your entire body of work. Therefore, it is important to suck your readers into your world by using language a reader can identify with. If writing on air pollution, an interesting introduction could be ‘Do you believe the earth belongs to you? For those who do, I have just one question for you. Why do you keep harming what belongs to you?’ from here, you can then proceed to discussing how humans create pollutants, their effect on the ecosystem and were you stand concerning air pollution. Developing Your Argument Now, your reader knows what you intend to talk about and your stance on that topic. The next step from here is developing your arguments by making claims you have the evidence needed to back-up your claims. A claim is simply a statement made in support of an argument, while the evidence you provide must include empirical facts that are results from credible researches and studies. For a topic such as air pollution, facts on the health implications of a polluted atmosphere in China, California and Italy can be used to support your claims. Refuting Contrary Views It just isn’t enough to simply state your claims and provide data to support them. When writing an argumentative essay, you must also take on views contrary to yours and ensure that you poke holes into their way of reasoning. Here, you have to remember that it’s your word against theirs which makes it important to also include hard facts that support your words while refuting contrary views. The use of facts to paint an air pollution essay where contamination is rampant and its effect is what makes your essay worth reading and believable to a reader. Conclude Your Argument A brilliant essay body also requires an excellent conclusion. Therefore, it is important that you restate your case, summarize the body of your essay and discuss your stance on the argument you made. This summary reinforces your entire argument in the mind of the reader and goes a long way in convincing people with opposing min sets to come-around to your way of thinking. If you are interested in learning more about using facts in argumentative essays on air pollution, reading this article on 10 argumentative essay facts on air pollution will help. If you are also looking for some ideas, check out these 20 argumentative essay topics on air pollution.

Axeman of New Orleans

What brought the city to their attention was the first crime made on May 23, 1918 when an Italian grocer, Joseph Maggio and his wife were butchered in their apartment during the night above the Maggio grocery store (Taylor). In the crime scene was the weapon, an axe, which seemed to have had been covered in blood. As police dug into the case, several suspects were questioned, but investigators seemed to be lacking evidence and the only clear clue seemed to be a message written in chalk near the home reading; â€Å"Mrs. Joseph Maggio will sit up tonight. Just write Mrs. Toney† (Taylor). Looking back into files, what seemed to appear was a case similar to the Maggio’s. Standing out was the use of an axe to chisel out an access way into the victim’s homes. More importantly in 1911 there were three other murders targeted towards Italian grocers (â€Å"Axeman†). There had to have been some kind of pattern forming. One month after the Maggio crimes came another scene of Louis Bossumer and Annie Harriet Lowe. Annie, discovered by neighbors lying in her own blood, claimed that her common law husband Mr. Bossumer attacked her. He lived behind his grocery store, but notice he was not Italian and survived, with a fractured skull (Smith). Popping out in the scene was again the access of the killer. In the house of Mr. Bossumer nothing was stolen, but the kitchen door was chiseled and lying on steps. After hospital treatment they were both released and with no charges pressed against them. Knowing that the â€Å"boogeyman† was still out there, New Orleans was preparing for another unplanned attack, and sure enough it took place a couple months later in August. Attacked, but not killed, was Mrs. Edward Schneider: she was found unconscious, with many gashes, and a few teeth missing from a fall of the axe. Seeing a small phantom-like form standing over her bed, she had awakened. No evidence was gathered, as with the murder of Joseph Romano who was an Italian grocer and was attacked just like others (â€Å"Axeman†). Police were never able to pick up any evidence of the identity of the Axeman. Now chaos was pouring through the city as families went into search groups and protected their families with shotguns. The month of August continued with exciting events, as the killer was spotted on August 11 attacking people in the streets, as rumors said (Taylor). Manhunts were created but nothing helped and even on August 21 a suspicious man was found leaping a fence but once again nothing was concluded. On August 11, a man named Al Durand found an axe and an attempt to chisel through his rear door, but apparently the door seemed to be too thick to cut through. Three more pieces of evidence appeared in three different ways. The rear door of Paul Lobella’s grocery and house was chiseled through while no one was home and with in the same day grocer Joseph Le Bouef reported an attempt to chisel through his rear door in the night. The last of the three pieces of evidence followed the next day when A. Recknagle, a grocer, found chisel marks on his back door also. Leaving the month of August and moving towards September 15 and past the disappearance of the Axemen for a while, were noticed more attempts of cutting through the door of Paul Durel’s house (Smith). Notice how these attempts all happened to grocers. Leaving the police questioning, the Axeman left the city for a while and no further crimes were reported until the year 1919. The day came in 1919 when the killer’s worst crime occurred. On March 10, across the river from New Orleans, Mrs. Charles Cortimiglia, a grocer’s wife, repeatedly denied the gruesome attack of her husband by a large man in dark clothing with an axe. The husband died and fell to the floor, and the wife was next on the list with her baby. While she asked and begged for mercy, the Axeman came down with the deadly weapon and killing the infant and leaving the mother with a fractured skull (Taylor). Notice the man who died was a grocer, maybe not Italian but the fact still connects with the other murders. Giving up, the police began thinking the impossible and saying that the Axeman really was not a man, but possibly a midget, with a better chance of falling through the cuttings of the doors. The police had to keep in mind what the victims saw, a â€Å"large man in a black suit. † Grasping for hope, the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper received an unexpected letter from the unknown Axeman, which was a huge piece of evidence. Summing up what the letter read, the Axeman declared he was invisible and no one would ever catch him. He alone knew who the victims were and he would leave no evidence except his bloody axe that would send people below to keep him company. He declared the police were stupid, but then again stated they were wise and knew how to keep him away from all harm. He said he is the worst murderer ever, but he could be much worse. Then what surprises them all is he blatantly says at 12:15 on next Tuesday night, he is going to pass over New Orleans and in his infinite mercy he is going to make a little proposition to the people, and here it is: â€Å"I am very fond of jazz music and I swear by all devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. People who do not jazz it up on Tuesday night will get the axe. † He leaves the letter signed as The Axeman (Wright). The people of New Orleans tried their best to follow what was asked but could not manage to arrive at peace with the Axeman. The people jammed with revelers, friends and family gathered to sing, and they did their best to â€Å"jazz it up,† which was suggested. The axe attack of Sarah Laumann made the people return home into safe hiding. What was different about this crime scene and what separated it out from others, was the fact of how the killer got in. He did not do his normal routine; instead he attempted to go through the window (Taylor). Riot in the city was now beginning to occur because Sarah was not a grocer or an Italian, leaving the gates open for everyone to be attacked, throwing the police off kilter. However, the next crime put them back on track. Another survivor, Steve Boca, trembled to walk with axe wounds. He managed to make it to his friend’s house who called for help, and did his best to help treat the wounds. Police found the normal signs of the Axeman, the chiseled door and bloody axe on the floor. Nearly a year later on September 2, a local man fired his gun at an attacker who broke into his house, but of course he escaped. Making his last impression on everybody, The Axeman had one more victim on his list to keep him company. Mike Pepitone was butchered as a grocer, in his bed at night. The room next to his, holding his six children and wife, was not touched. Noticing the relationship between the first and last murder, both were butchered and grocers. His coming and going was done and New Orleans, still frightened, in their shoes slowly started to calm down. Even though the police still have this case labeled as unsolved, the reason may as well be because that generation has all passed and they are now dealing with today’s issues and keeping everyone else safe. Just because the police have not come to a conclusion does not mean other people do not have one. A possible conclusion came to mind, that the guilty party is Joseph Mumfre. Though he is not referenced in the evidence, Esther Albano, who was the widow of the Axeman’s latest victim, later killed him. As the investigation was being made, certain things about Mumfre stood out, to making him the possible murder Mumfre was once the leader in a jazz band, which was one of the Axeman’s suggestions to keep him away. Another aspect of the band was they seemed to have preyed on the Italians, and half of the Axeman’s murders were Italian (Taylor). This unsolved case soon became old news and people moved on and unpleasantly found peace with the Axeman, who disappeared to the coast.

Marxist Interpretation of Hairstyles of the Damned Essay

Marxist Interpretation of Hairstyles of the Damned - Essay Example Gretchen is an overweight tom-boy, rude, ballsy and punk rocker who â€Å"wasn't the most feminine girl in the world, sincerely,† always involved in fights and is in love with a 26-year old (Meno 4). Brian tries to make her a mix-tape which results in their separation for some time. This struggle for identification recurs in the whole novel as Brian tries to define himself among his peers who have distinct traits that places them is particular classes. The Marxist literary theory attributes such traits to historical forces which shape the environment, character traits of the inhabitants and the language and writing style of the author. Therefore, there are forces that guide the traits and values of the teenagers in the setting which also lead to conflicts among various classes. Siegel defines the Marxist literary theory as a sociological approach in literature that considers the works in question as a result of historical forces whose analysis could be achieved by considering the material conditions that led to its formation. The general focus is on the conflict between the repressed and dominant classes at any age, encouraging art to imitate the objective reality. ‘Hairstyles of the Damned’ provides a perfect example of conflict in different classes due to what the society has upheld over time, particularly among the teenagers. The novel supports the fact that the environment plays an important role in shaping what one would uphold with high esteem and probably consider trendy and fashionable. In the novel, Brian’s lifestyle is shaped differently by the friends he meets and bonds with. As an outsider, it becomes hard for him to make friends and only befriends outsiders like him including Rod, Mike, Dorie and Nick who shape his path towards finding himself and the values in life. Encountering different friends, it would be noted that in every section of the novel, Brian would have his favorite music from different genres in line with what the peers upheld with high regard. The environment further classified them into blacks and whites, cheerleaders and jocks, outcasts and rich kids, burnouts and punks, which shaped her mind and what he would perceive as the desired lifestyle. Gretchen for instance had all she wanted and that is why Brian noted that â€Å"she did the things I wish I could do but didn't have the guts to† (Meno 15). The characters in the narration are young with and the adults therein immature. Their major interest is in sex, music, bands, clothing and less on schoolwork. Brian secured a job but co-worker issues stumbled his way. In his racial neighborhood, the parents are less caring and uninvolved in his proper upbringing. This causes teenage aimlessness and indulgence into pop culture without regard for how this causes loss of individuality. The neon colored hair was adored among the young and every other teenager would try to fit into this cultural definition of being in a high social cl ass. Brian seemed to adore characters like Bobby B., a kid from his neighborhood, a year older than him and a senior who â€Å"always had about five pairs of girls’ underwear from girls he had made with† (Meno 10). The author glorifies some material aspects of the characters that would appeal to teens like Bobby’