Valediction vs. Conjoined

woo hoo for not procrastinating!

In the poem’s, Conjoined, by Judith Minty, and, A Valediction, by John Donne, both authors employ figurative language to convey each of their opposing ideas of relationships. The use of diction, metaphors, and imagery are all used to reveal Minty’s opinion of relationships being a burden and an unnatural occurrence. Similarly, these same rhetorical devices are used to establish Donne’s viewpoint as his love being divine and incomprehensible to, “dull sublunary lovers.”
Both poems employ a sense of diction that helps to convey to the reader his/her ideas about relationships. In Minty’s, Conjoined, we can see through her use of diction that she believes relationships are unnecessary and that ideas like marriage aren’t natural. For example, Minty compares two conjoined onions to marriage, calling it, “a monster,” where, “each [is] half-round, then flat and deformed.” Within the very first line of the poem, Minty compares what most people think of to be a holy, sacred thing, to that of a monster. This blunt statement is followed by saying that the onion is, “flat and deformed” suggesting that there is nothing exciting about marriage, and that it is definitely not natural.
In the second stanza, Minty refers to the conjoined twins of Chang and Eng as, “freaks.” It’s not a natural thing for two humans to be, “joined at the chest by skin and muscle,” so she claims it a fair thing to say they are, “doomed to live, even make love, together for sixty years.” The words, “freaks” and, “doomed” certainly don’t convey a, “happily ever after” tone, and this is precisely what Minty wishes to accomplish through the use of these words. Furthermore, just by inserting the phrase, “even make love” puts a disturbing image in the mind of the reader. Through this imagery, Minty attempts to prove that marriage too, can be as disturbing as the image previously imagined.
Minty uses imagery and diction to convey marriage as an abnormality, while Donne uses these same techniques to produce the opposite effect. Within the many metaphor’s that Donne uses, he often refers to the universe, or some kind of astronomical term. For example, he talks about how, “the earth brings harm and fears…but trepidation of the spheres though greater far, is innocent.” He also says, “Dull sublunary lovers’ love…” making light of lovers whose love is within the earth’s atmosphere. Through referencing these terms, the reader gets a sense of divinity, and feels that some how the speaker’s love is more pure than anyone else’s because of that.
Not only do Donne and Minty use diction in a way that helps them to convey their views on relationships, they also use metaphors that are relevant in making their argurment stronger. For example, Minty compares a, “two-headed calf” to what some would call, an eternal bond: marriage. Besides the fact that these calves, “fight to suck at [their] mother’s teats” just the nature of this metaphor is obscene and unusual. To compare marriage to a two headed calf demotes it to a new level. This metaphor surely helps to ensure Minty’s stance on marriage, that not only is it unnatural, but that it also bring about much unnecessary fighting. Also, through metaphor, Minty claims that once someone is bonded with another in marriage, they lose a part of themselves. She achieves this through the metaphor of the onion in the first stanza, saying, “each half round, then flat and deformed/where it pressed and grew against the other.” Each onion is only half round, and is deformed where it meets the other. This, she claims, is like marriage. Once you are bonded to someone, you lose a part of yourself, and become, “flat and deformed.”
Donne too employs metaphors to establish his position of relationships. One metaphor he uses compares the needles of compasses to the speaker and his lover. He says that the lover is, “the fixed foot” and that the speaker only moves, “if th’ other do.” The speaker only goes where the partner goes, suggesting that they are one, as if it were as natural as breathing. In the second to last stanza he goes on to say, “Yet when the other far doth roam, /It leans and harkens after it.” He is saying that the speaker will do anything to be with his partner, and produces the image that he constantly seeks to be with her. This metaphor seems to be perfect, and is topped off by saying, Thy firmness draws my circle just, /And makes me end where I begun. In essence, he is saying that she can make him perfect, and that together, they can truly be a perfect couple.
Both Donne and Minty explore diction, metaphors, and imagery in their poems, each of which help to convey their views on relationships. Donne takes the positive, saying that love can be divine, while Minty claims marriage and relationships are abnormal and unnecessarily painful.

They Carried

To be honest, I’m not up to speed on, The Things They Carried, but I hope to be able to get caught up by Tuesday. Now, with that being said, I’m basically just going to share my thoughts on what we’ve talked about in class and what I’ve read up to now.
Probably one of the most interesting things I’ve ever come to a realization of is what we talked about in class on Friday. I never thought about it this way before, but It is so true that sometimes, something that is not the truth, can be more true than the truth itself. When we first talked about this, I was a little upset, because I thought the idea was ridiculous, because after all, how can something that’s not true be truer than the truth? Anyway, as we went on to explore the subject, I realized that the answer to this question was that the “story” that one may be telling, can be more true than truth itself because of the emotions it can convey.
In, how to tell a true war story, the narrator says, “a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth…A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The narrator goes on to tell a “not true” story and claims it is truer than the true war story because of the emotions it conveys. In other words, probably a lot of these stories aren’t necessarily true, however they capture the truth better than the “true” story would capture it.
In summation, The Things They Carried contains the theme of “truth vs untruth, or stories” that convey to the reader more truth than one could get out of any “factual” Vietnam War history book.

postmodernism

I don’t know if I can actually define postmodernism in one blog post, because there are so many different aspects of it. Anyway, I guess I’ll just talk about a few. Absent Centers, Deconstruction, Self Awareness, Truth, Grand Narratives and many other pieces combine to make this, “postmodern theory.” Centers, or central ideas that people base their way of living off of are highly discouraged in this theory. In other words, the postmodern thinker would have one to believe that there is no one correct way to live, and that nothing should be forced upon you. Who’s to say that there is one right way to talk for example? Who’s to say that southern dialect or “gangsta” isn’t acceptable? The ridding of this center opens the minds of people and allow people to become more accepting of one another. Then we have deconstruction, where defining it breaks its own rules. What I mean to say is that deconstruction is all about breaking things down to their base, to say that nothing is “right,” and nothing is “wrong.” In MAUS II, we learned all about self awareness. Art Spiegelman recognized that what he was writing was a comic book, and not anything else. He didn’t try to represent the absolute truth, just one persons perception of it. And Grand Narratives, pretty much when someone comes up with an idea that can account for a lot of things. I don’t really agree with a lot of postmodern theory, but I do agree with some of it, and I’m glad to have widened my way of thinking, and expanded my knowledge of the subject. I can see why Mr. D is against grades and scantron tests and what not, since I too think that a lot of subjects cannot consist of the whole truth, but instead one’s perception of it, such as history.

MAUS II

Once again I don't know what to write about for this essay. So once again I made a simple search on Google and found an interesting interview with Art Spiegelman and Harvey Bloom. Anyway, I fumbled through it until I came across something that had to do with postmodernism (because I don't know how this book relates to it, and I wanted some help) and I found some things.
First of all just the genre that it is in helps to classify it as a postmodern work. The whole, "deconstruction" idea, like trying to break something down, or in Bloom's words, "Postmodernism also implies genre meltdown, so that it gets very hard to classify things, including distinctions between fact and fiction." Its not the traditional comic book. The comic book itself it deconstructed to its simplest form, the form that McCloud refers to as, "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce and aesthetic response in the viewer."
Well, I still dont know what i'm going to write about, and I definately dont have a halfway decent thesis idea, but here are some intersting things I picked up on as i read...
First of all, the irony and self awareness that it employs. I think it's in the 1st chapter when Art and Francoise are driving, and he, says something like, "You'd never let me talk this long in real life." It knows its a comic, and it not trying to be anything more than that by pretending it is actual representation of the holocaust.
2ndly, some of the irony includes two people who die after surviving the entire camp of Auschwitz. The first and probably more obvious is Anja, who committs suicide. I'm guessing she did this out of some sort of guilt, like she didnt feel worthy or something to be alive after tons of people were killed. She must've felt like she hadent done anything special, or that she was just lucky. Either way, its an ironic situation. Another example of this is on page 132. You can go read it if you want but basically one of the guys made it through and got hung right at the very end.
These are just some of the things that I thought were interesting and maybe i could develop them farther when it comes time for me to write this essay.

Google response

After reading Carr’s article, “Is Google making us stupider,” I must disagree with most of his arguments. First of all, no one and nothing can “make” you do anything. You choose to do everything. Weather that means choosing to read an article less closely or “bouncing” from site to site, it is all up to you how deep you look into a certain text. In the article, Carr quotes Bruce Friedman, who said, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” I however think this claim in context is completely absurd. What I mean is that although this may be true, it is not the internets fault that this man has lost this ability. If he truly wanted to “read and absorb” and article, he just has to be willing to do it. The fact that the internet has made information available to us within just a few seconds makes us think that we don’t need to really learn the information, because the it’s saved into cyberspace. However just because we don’t necessarily need to retain this information is not making us any dumber. After all, we’re the ones who choose not to thoroughly read the article, or who choose to “bounce” around web pages.

Friedman continues to say, “Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” To me this statement seems ridiculous. I don’t think it has anything to do with the internet that this man doesn’t read articles deeply anymore. To me it just sounds like he’s lazy.

Another thing I didn’t like about the article was how much it generalized. “When we read online…our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.” First of all, this article is online and I’m pretty sure all of Mr. Dominguez’s AP Literature classes read it. Now how deeply they read it is a different story, but they must have read it deep enough to write a 300 word response to it. So just in doing this assignment I think we’ve proven this claim to be false. Sure, it may be true some people have lost that ability, but to claim that “we” as an entire group have lost the ability is not true.

pseudo-modernism

After watching the, “Did You Know” video and reading part of the article by Dr. Alan Kirby, I think we may indeed be reaching an era of “post postmodernism”. In the article, Kirby calls this idea, “pseudo-modernism.” “Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener.” We talked about this same idea in class when we talked about how anyone can post something on the internet. We invent the text, we create new ideas, and as the video shared, “we’re preparing students for jobs that don’t even exist yet.”

Also in this article, Kirby relates this “pseudo-modernism” concept to the show, Big Brother, by saying that without the voters, the audience, the show could not exits. We create the results. “By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them.” Simply take the internet for example, it cannot exist without the information that we put on it. With this information growing exponentially as shown by the video, we stray form the main ideas of post modernism and into those of pseudo-modernism.

“Postmodern philosophy emphasizes the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge.” Pseudo-modernism however doesn’t care how hard it is to define meaning or knowledge. Knowledge is out there, and how or where we get it from isn’t the point. Science for science does not apply, the concept is now science for progression. Knowledge is climbing so fast, we can hardly keep up with it. Okay well this might not make any sense, but oh well.

Cat's Cradle

This book Cat’s Cradle I think has a lot of post modernistic themes within it. The first thing I noticed in this book that seemed to relate most with what we’ve been talking about in class is found in the beginingish of chapter 4. “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” At first, this statement seems like an obvious contradiction, but when I thought about it in terms of what we’ve been talking about in class, I came to realize that nothing can be considered an “absolute” truth. This is why he says that even though the things he says are true, the words he uses to say them are not. However, just because things, or words in particular, can never be absolute truths, does not mean that there can be no truths. I mean, how else would the human race communicate if not for the attachment of “words” to certain objects or even non-tangible things, such as emotion? “Words” are an obvious necessity, even if they are just symbols for the real object, and I find it funny that this seems like a big deal.
Anyway, I also remembered the part in the end of chapter 6 where Dr. Hoenikker questions the true nature of sin. For the sake of the assignment, I’ll quote it. “A scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’” Sin, being a non-tangible object, cannot be clearly represented. Since the word sin cannot be attached to an actual object, it is connected to other words, that are connected to more words. This is similar to what we talked about in class, about not being able to reach an end to definitions, or to find an absolute truth.
Anyway, I mostly just think that even though things or ideas can never exits naturally, they still do exits, because we made them. And that’s ok.