The Extraordinary Family in Judith Guests novel, Ordinary People :: Judith Guest Ordinary People Essays

The Extraordinary Family in Judith Guest's novel, Ordinary People    Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People evinces some main principles of the modernist literary movement, such as the philosophy that modern man is beset by existential angst and alienation. According to Carl Marx, a renowned existentialist, alienation, as a result of the industrial revolution, has made modern man alienated from the product of his own labor, and has made him into a mechanical component in the system. Being a "cog in the wheel" prevents modern man from gaining a sense of internal satisfaction of intellectual and emotional pleasure. Further more, according to Sigmund Freud, there are two pleasures, work and love. Consequently, Freud would say that being disconnected from pleasure from work, half of the potential for psychological fulfillment would be lost. Modern man is suffering from alienation as a result of large institutions, and as individuals, modern man neither feels that they are part of them nor can understand them. Additionally, the existentialists say , man is shut out of history. Modern man no longer has a sense of having roots in a meaningful past nor sees himself as moving toward a meaningful future. The modern man also suffers from alienation in his relationships with other people. Since he lives life not authentically and not knowing who he is, he cannot relate to others authentically. Hence, there are no real relationships at work and there are no real relationships of love. Also, according to Sartre, modern man is absolutely not a victim of his environments, of his childhood, and the circumstances in his life. The events in life are only neutral and since modern man is free, he chooses the meanings of the facts of his life. Modern man lives in a constant state of existential angst, which is dread of the nothingness of human existence and the fact there is no underlying purpose to human existence or set of objective truths or morals by which to navigate life. According to Martin Heideggar, German existentialist philosopher, the unaware person tries to escape the reality of death by not living life to the fullest. However, death can be the most significant moment for the individual, his defining moment of personal potential, if accepted and confronted squarely will free the individual from anxiety of death. The Extraordinary Family in Judith Guest's novel, Ordinary People :: Judith Guest Ordinary People Essays The Extraordinary Family in Judith Guest's novel, Ordinary People    Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People evinces some main principles of the modernist literary movement, such as the philosophy that modern man is beset by existential angst and alienation. According to Carl Marx, a renowned existentialist, alienation, as a result of the industrial revolution, has made modern man alienated from the product of his own labor, and has made him into a mechanical component in the system. Being a "cog in the wheel" prevents modern man from gaining a sense of internal satisfaction of intellectual and emotional pleasure. Further more, according to Sigmund Freud, there are two pleasures, work and love. Consequently, Freud would say that being disconnected from pleasure from work, half of the potential for psychological fulfillment would be lost. Modern man is suffering from alienation as a result of large institutions, and as individuals, modern man neither feels that they are part of them nor can understand them. Additionally, the existentialists say , man is shut out of history. Modern man no longer has a sense of having roots in a meaningful past nor sees himself as moving toward a meaningful future. The modern man also suffers from alienation in his relationships with other people. Since he lives life not authentically and not knowing who he is, he cannot relate to others authentically. Hence, there are no real relationships at work and there are no real relationships of love. Also, according to Sartre, modern man is absolutely not a victim of his environments, of his childhood, and the circumstances in his life. The events in life are only neutral and since modern man is free, he chooses the meanings of the facts of his life. Modern man lives in a constant state of existential angst, which is dread of the nothingness of human existence and the fact there is no underlying purpose to human existence or set of objective truths or morals by which to navigate life. According to Martin Heideggar, German existentialist philosopher, the unaware person tries to escape the reality of death by not living life to the fullest. However, death can be the most significant moment for the individual, his defining moment of personal potential, if accepted and confronted squarely will free the individual from anxiety of death.

Gender Roles and the Perception of Women Essay

There was a time that having a daughter born to a family evoked more pity than congratulations from the community. Sons were valued more for they were viewed to bring practical help towards augmenting the family income through physical labor, as well as ensuring that the family name lives on with his progeny. (â€Å"Feminism†) Daughters were valued only for the potential honor they could bring the family with a good marriage. In olden days, a good marriage was not necessarily defined by the couple’s happiness but rather was deemed as such if both families stand to benefit from the union. Usually benefits would be measured in wealth, alliance or business. Marriages then were basically â€Å"mergers. † Women were not expected to accomplish anything other than the mastery of domestic duties and union with a suitable husband. After marriage, the only duties that a woman is supposed to fulfill are to look after the needs of her husband and give birth to as many children as possible with preference to the birthing of sons. The 1920’s and 30’s saw a wave of feminism that sought to overturn the traditional gender role assigned to women. They viewed patriarchy as oppressive to women and advanced the thinking that women are complements of males and therefore should be treated as equals. The 1920’s also saw a major victory for women in the United States with the passage of a law that allowed for women’s suffrage. (â€Å"Feminism†) The Second World War in the 1940’s also provided women with the opportunity to prove their worth outside their duties as homemakers. They started signing up as army nurses, members of women’s corps and workers in factories that provided supplies and ammunition to the â€Å"boys overseas. † Even with this however, women still experienced discrimination at the hands of employers who believed that it was the men’s role to earn money for their families. Those that were hired still had to face inequality in wages as their work were deemed easier compared to the men’s. (Acker 46) It has continually been an uphill climb for women in the assertion of their rights and the fight for identity and equality. Despite the many progresses made by women since the olden days, some cultures still place more premium on males. Sandra Cisneros’ account (Kirszner, 96-99) of being and born and living in a traditional, patriarchal society in the 1950’s show that even with the many new freedoms and rights accorded to women, their roles were still defined by marriage and domestic duties. â€Å"What I didn’t realize was that my father thought college was good for girls –good for finding a husband. After four years of college and two more in graduate school, and still no husband, my father shakes his head even now and says I wasted all that education. † (Kirszner 97) The selection further goes on to relate the attempts made by Cisneros in getting her father to acknowledge her achievements and herself as more than â€Å"only a daughter. † She wanted to BE his daughter in every sense of the word and enjoy the same pride her father has in her brothers’ achievements. I often witness the â€Å"hunch posture,† from women after dark on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live. They seem to set their faces on neutral and, with their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. (Kirszner 242) In Brent Staples’ observations in the â€Å"Black Man effect† in altering a public space (Kirszner 240), he presents the image of a woman who is determined to move forward yet remains aware of the possible challenges to her progress. While in the story the context women is defined in is couched in terms of potential threat from street violence and crimes, one could almost picture the same description as applicable to the grim and set determination of the feminists who steadfastly battles for women’s rights and progress. It has been many years since women achieved a major victory in suffrage and set about to establishing their identity in society. Yet in some cases, there seem to be some women who remain oblivious or at least, not benefited by the new stature and rights women have been able to claim through years of struggle with a male-dominated society. In Anna Deavere Smith’s â€Å"Four American Characters† monologue (2005) she shares a conversation she had with an elderly philosopher friend she had, Maxine Green. In the conversation, Smith asked Green:† What are two things that you don’t know and still want to know? † Green replies: â€Å"Personally I still feel that I have to curtsy when I see the president of our University and I feel that I ought to get coffee for my male colleagues even though I’ve outlived most of them. † Smith follows this up with the characterization of Maryland convict Paulette Jenkins. Paulette Jenkins represents the women in abusive relationship who suffer in silence. She never spoke out because she didn’t want people to know that there was something wrong with her family. She took her husband’s abuse and allowed him to do the same to her children†¦children that she had in the belief that it would soften her husband. What would make a man do such a thing? At the same time, what would make a woman stand by helplessly as her husband beats up her children and herself? Conflict in relationships between men and women are believed to stem from four main reasons: men’s jealousy, men’s expectation of women and domestic work, men’s sense of â€Å"right† to â€Å"punish† their women, and the importance to men of asserting and keeping their authority. Women on the other hand, are kept silent due to feelings of shame and responsibility (Dobash, and Dobash 4). More often than not, the women feel that they deserved whatever the husband did to them. This acquiescence may be due to their cultural orientation of women as subservient wives. Upbringing and cultural orientation can do much to influence a person’s understanding and acceptance of gender roles. (Dobash, and Dobash 4) However, there is always the freedom of choice and personal introspection, which should allow individuals to reason out right and wrong and the applicability and rationale of traditions for themselves. The case of Sandra Cisneros is the perfect illustration of this. Despite being brought up in a highly patriarchal household and culture, she chose to follow her own desire and achieve in her own right. In the end, she managed to earn her father’s respect and acknowledgment that she, as a woman, can accomplish and gain honor and pride for the family. Regardless of background, doctrine or culture, everyone, man and woman, has that same choice in choosing how their manhood or womanhood will be defined in their lives. Works Cited Acker, Joan. â€Å"What Happened to the Women’s Movement? -An Exchange. † Monthly Review Oct. 2001: 46. Questia. 28 Sept. 2007 . â€Å"Feminism. † The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2004. Questia. 28 Sept. 2007 . Dobash, R. Emerson, and Russell P. Dobash. Women, Violence, and Social Change. New York: Routledge, 1992. Questia. 28 Sept. 2007 . Kirszner, Laurie. Patterns for College Writing 10th ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2006. Mcneill, William H. â€Å"Violence & Submission in the Human Past. † Daedalus 136. 1 (2007): 5+. Questia. 28 Sept. 2007 . Smith, Anna Deveare. Four American Characters. 2005 TED. com. 27 Sept 2007 < http://www. ted. com/index. php/talks/view/id/60>

Richard III: Power of Language and Own Villainy

Deformed in body and twisted in mind, Richard is in every way the dominant character of the play, to the extent that he is both the play’s protagonist and major villain. He is selfish, evil, corrupt, sadistic, and manipulative. His intelligence, political brilliance, and dazzling use of language keeps the audience fascinated and his subjects and rivals under his control. At the beginning of the play, it is made clear to the audience that Richard has no justification for seizing the throne. This is because England is obviously not oppressed or subject to tyranny as the lengthy civil war has just ended, and Richard’s oldest brother, King Edward IV, now sits on the throne. Richard himself, states that ‘All the clouds that loured upon our house’ (1. 1, 3), the house of York, has been dispelled by the ‘son of York’ (1. 1, 2), King Edward IV. However, Richard intends to upset the kingdom by seizing power for himself. He says that ‘since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain’ (1. , 28). This simply means that since Richard was not made to be a lover, he has no use for peace, and will happily destroy peace with his crimes. This shows Richard’s unabashed enjoyment of his own villainy as he can so blithely toss aside all of the things that the rest of humanity cherishes. Richard III is an intense exploration of the psychology of evil, and that exploration is centred on the workings of Richard’s mind and the methods he uses to manipulate, control, and injure others for his own gain. Perhaps more than any other play by Shakespeare, the audience of Richard III experiences a complex, indefinite, and highly erratic relationship with the main character. Richard is clearly a villain as he declares outright in his very first speech that he intends to stop at nothing to achieve his ultimate goal of becoming king. However, despite his open allegiance to evil, he has such a charismatic and fascinating personality that, for much of the play, we are likely to sympathize with him, or are at least impressed by him. In this way, our relationship with Richard reflects the other characters’ relationships with him, conveying a powerful sense of the force of his personality. Even characters such as Lady Anne, who have an explicit knowledge of his wickedness, overlook his dishonesty and violent behaviour and allow themselves to be seduced by his brilliant wordplay, his skilful argumentation, and his relentless pursuit of his selfish desires. Richard’s long, fascinating soliloquys, in which he outlines his plans and gleefully confesses all his evil thoughts, are central to the audience’s experience of Richard. Shakespeare uses these soliloquys brilliantly to control the audience’s impression of Richard, enabling this manipulative protagonist to work his charm on the audience. In Act I, scene i, for example, Richard offers a pretext for his villainy towards others by pointing out that he is unloved, and that he is unloved because of his physical deformity. Richard himself is brutally honest about his appearance. He admits to being imperfectly shaped and blames premature birth for his condition. He knows that he is ‘not shaped for sportive tricks’ (1. 1, 14) and while others delight in ‘an amorous looking glass’ (1. , 14), his misshapen body creates a ‘shadow in the sun’ (1. 1, 26) that alienates him from others. Hence, Lady Anne calls Richard a ‘lump of foul deformity’ (1. 2, 57) in Act I, scene ii. This proves that Richard’s claim not only makes the other characters of the play seem like the villains for punishing him for his appearance, but also makes it easy for the audience to sympathize with Richard during the first scenes of the play and even hope that he will succeed despite his obvious villainy. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Richard simply uses his deformity as a tool to gain the sympathy of others, including the audience. This is already noticeable in his very first speech as Richard seems to take a deliberate perverse delight in his outward shape. He chooses words such as, ‘cheated’, ‘deformed’, ‘unfinished’, ‘half made up’, ‘dogs bark’ at him as he passes by because of his ‘deformity’ to describe himself. Richard’s unabashed villainy is a much more natural part of his character than simple bitterness about his ugly body. Nevertheless, he still manages to use speech to win our trust, and he repeats this throughout his struggle to be crowned king. An interesting secondary theme of Richard III is the power of language, or the importance of language in achieving political power. Language may not always be a necessary instrument of power, but for Richard, it is a crucial weapon. As we have seen, it is with his extraordinary skills with words that allows him to ridicule, insult, taunt and deceive all who stand in his way to power. Richard’s skill with language and argument is what enables him to woo Lady Anne, have Clarence thrown in prison and blame the king for Clarence’s death, all at very little risk to himself. In conclusion, I feel Richard III’s unabashed enjoyment of both the power of language and his own villainy makes him a character worthy of both respect and admiration, and therefore I completely agree with this statement. This is because Richard’s unabashed power of language shows off the ingenious wit and intellectual cleverness of the character, actor and playwright, while his own villainy makes the play all the more fascinating and entertaining as his heinous acts become more chilling.

Aesthetic Reading: Reading for Appreciation and Enjoyment Essay

Aesthetic reading is for entertainment. * Reading to explore one. * In Aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he likes through during his relationship with that particular text.† * Non-academicals purposes of reading. Aesthetic Stance is for experience * Recreational reading. * Fulfills an important function in lives. * Reading for pleasure or aesthetic reading, been described as â€Å"the most hidden literary practice†. * Aesthetic reading been viewed as â€Å"symbolic withdrawal†. Reading for appreciation * One that is designed to head the learner to understand and enjoy something. Let’s get the most out of Literature * Reading literary selections like poems, short stories, novels, plays, or essays, not only provide pleasure. * It also develop your analytical skills as you must consider each part of the text separately before you can interpret the meaning of the entire work and eventually appreciate it. Poems express ideas in a tighter, more compact way than prose as they do not include details and explanations common to the short story or novel. They are more concentrated, suggestive, and rhythmical than prose as they resort to the use of symbols, figurative language, and imagery, which tend to leave more to a reader’s imagination rather than giving everything he needs to know. Poems may be: * Lyric poem expresses the observations and the feeling of a single speaker. * Narrative poems are stories told in prose. Often narrative poems, even ballads have all the elements of the short stories, such as plot, characters and setting. Poems may take the form of: * Haiku – an unrhymed verse form, consisting of three lines. The first and third lines contain five syllables while the second line consists of seven syllables. * Tanka – another verse form. It has thirty-one syllables arrange in five lines (five, seven, five, seven, seven). * Cinquain – a poetic unrhymed form consisting of five lines. * Diamante – a seven line, diamond shaped poem.

Inseparability of Markets and Regulations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Inseparability of Markets and Regulations - Essay Example As such, it protects healthcare consumers by ensuring that the services provided to them are satisfactory and efficiently meet their tastes and preferences. Through licensing, the board controls competition and deviant practices within the medical field. It also safeguards consumers’ interests by guaranteeing that medical costs are within the conventional standards and affordable level (Lee, 2009). GCMB has a board of directors that comprises of 15 voting members and an ex-officio chosen by the governor. Its current chair is Richard Weil. Among the 15 voting members, 11 are physicians with Doctor of Medicine grades, 2 are dynamically practicing physicians with Doctor of Physiotherapy degrees, and 2 members are consumer members, who main role is to represent the interests of healthcare consumers (GCMD, 2014). GCMB represents the cultural diversity prevalent in Georgia. The board members are drawn from different regions within the state and represent the various social, economic, and political interests of a diverse population. The board is a fair representation of the community it is serving since it has incorporated the interests of different groups into its mission, goal, and objectives. However, the board still faces a challenge in regulating medical practitioners due to increased misconducts in the medical sector and the diversity of the field of medicine. New trends in medicine have too posted a challenge for GCMB (Lee, 2009). For instance, lethal injection practices and physicians participation in executions have proven to be hard to control. The incentives offered to the board are not enough to finance its activities and the cost of providing the licensing services has upsurge posing a challenge to the relevance of

Failed business innovation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Failed business innovation - Essay Example However, not all innovations are successful. Some of the innovations after their launch fail due to a number of reasons that are inherent to their development. When an innovation fails, the companies may quit innovating or revise its strategies. For most innovators, failure acts as a trigger to innovate further. These innovators get better ideas from their failed experiments and in most cases, the innovations come out successful (Dalal, n.d.). Failure and success occurs to both big and small businesses. How a business whether big or small deals with the outcome, determines how successful it can be in its innovation. An example of a failed business innovation is the COMET jet passenger liner. COMET jet passenger liner known as the de Havilland Comet 1 was the first jet airliner in the history of air transport. The jet airliner entered into service in the year 1952 on May 2. The jet airliner served the routes between London and Johannesburg. The launch and commercialization of de Havilland Comet was done in 1952. Before its launch, the Comet was put under extensive series of flight tests that included tropical operations, overseas flights and high altitude takeoffs. The test flights amounted to 500 hours of proving flights and flight crew training. Having satisfactorily completed the tests, the Comet jet airliner was given a go ahead to start its operations. The inauguration of the de Havilland Comet jet airliner commercial services between London and Johannesburg, and Singapore and Tokyo was done by the British Overseas Airways Corporation. The start of the commercial services was successful utilizing only 23.5 hours for the trip between London and Johannesburg instead of the normal 40 hours that a normal aircraft utilizes. The hours used were inclusive of the refueling stops in Rome, Beirut, Khartoum, Entebbe and Livingstone. This was the start of the jet airline evolution and the

Geology week 8 discussion question 2 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Geology week 8 discussion question 2 - Essay Example Mineral resources are a form of nonrenewable natural resources in the form of rocks from the ground. These are usually coal, copper, iron, lead, natural gas, oil, silver, tin and uranium (Anderson, 2010). These are considered nonrenewable because they could not be easily replenished and would take millions of years to create. The two major problems associated with the use of fossil fuels are: (1) potential environmental harm of its by-products such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide which are known to be contributory to climate change and global warming; and (2) dangers to human health due to its by-products such as nitrogen oxides which increases preponderance to respiratory illnesses and cardiovascular problems (Sustainable Table, n.d.). Anderson, P. (2010, September 23). Mineral Resources: Renewable & Nonrenewable. Retrieved March 7, 2012, from schoolworkhelper.com: