Thomas Pynchon & Entropy

Thomas Pynchon wrote in the 1960's and uses conventions of science and science fiction throughout many of his stories. He was very interested in how science looked in literature form. Pynchon is a very intellectual writer and is a very sarcastic and ironic narrator. In his story, Entropy, Pynchon uses entropy to signify how the world is stuck on its path of sameness. Entropy measures an organization in a closed system, so for him, it means the death of imagination and difference, the change or loss of energy in culture. So Pynchon uses lots of energy in his writing because he fears this loss of energy. Thematically, he uses his interest in science to support the story but doesn't provide endings that have closure. Instead he uses a more flippant tone that is sarcastic, ironic, and hard to grasp sometimes. With this piece, Thomas Pynchon also establishes his post-modernism style partially through the closure-less ending style that he uses and the science fiction.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway authored many stories and books including the Old Man and the Sea and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway uses the idea of 'stream of consciousness' to tell a story about him and his lover. William Faulkner was also a famous writer who was known for using the 'stream of consciousness' in his writing a lot. So the story that Hemingway writes is about a man and a woman (the man's lover) that he brings with him on a trip up into the mountains of Kilimanjaro to spend time alone together. This woman was not his wife but depicts the realness of the relationship in the dialog. This story is autobiographical of Ernest Hemingway and illustrates the pain he feels for leaving his first wife for the second one (Pauline, the woman who he has an affair with while with his first wife and the best friend of his first wife). In fact, many of Hemingway's stories are about relationships between men and women. Each time he wrote a new story, Hemingway had to 'reinvent' himself in order to keep his creative juices flowing of new characters and issues to write about. So when he created this new persona often times he needed a new wife to fit his new person so that he would have a new muse to work with and new ideas. Hemingway ended up marrying four different women throughout his life.

Kate Chopin

I also enjoyed reading Kate Chopin's stories At the 'Cadian Ball, The Storm, and Desiree's Baby. In her writing, Kate Chopin grasps the southern/cajun dialect of the area in her characters. The Storm is a sort of sequel to At the 'Cadian Ball by following the two main characters and telling of their life many years later. Of course, the character Alcee Laballiere cheated on his wife with the character seductive Calixta that we met in At the 'Cadian Ball. The end of The Storm leads the reader to believe that these two characters have arranged to continue their affair for at least a little while longer. In Desiree's Baby, Chopin throws the reader a twisted ending. At first, the reader thinks that one of Desiree's parents might have been black because there is no evidence to prove that they weren't since she was adopted. However, we find out right at the very end that her ex-husband actually is the one that has a black parent. The real reason why he sends Desiree away is because he is ashamed of it and doesn't want anyone to know. So instead he blames her for the baby's color and sends her along with the baby away. I enjoyed the story but it was very sad.

Sarah Orne Jewett

This week's readings on regionalism, realism, and naturalism featured Sarah Orne Jewett as one of the writers. I really liked her story, A White Heron. In this story, Jewett's writing is considered a "hallmark of New England regionalism" ( Norton Anthology, Sarah Orne Jewett biography, pg. 415). In this story, a young girl meets a strange man on her walk back home. The man is a ornithologist who is looking for a specific white heron. The man stays with her and her grandmother for a couple of days while he hunts the surrounding area for the bird. Sylvia, the young girl, becomes mesmorized by the young man and follows him around. "Sylvia still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delightful; the woman's heart, asleep in the child, was vaugely thrilled by a dream of love" (pg. 419, Sarah Orne Jewett, The White Heron, Norton Anthology). The young man asks Sylvia to tell him where the white heron's hiding place is and in exchange for the knowledge he will give her and her grandmother money. Sylvia and her grandmother are very poor but Sylvia still can't bring herself to indulge the young sportsman with the information he is looking for because she cares to much for the birds and the nature which she calls home.

WK 7 Mark Twain & Stephan Crane

Mark Twain is very widely known for his clever novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin. In Twain creates characters that others can relate to in his area and then uses humor to build up these characters. One of his great talents is his use of dialects in his writing, especially that of southern Mississippi (which is where he grew up). Mark Twain also uses young a naive characters to explore the world and to point out hypocrisies of the way that people do things. Stephan Crane, however, is more obsessed with war and physical/psychic violence. Stephan Crane's writing is much more modern than others of his time; he did this because he wanted to distinguish his own identity. Crane, as does Twain, like to write about the man vs. nature. In contrast to Twain, Crane write more about how people realistically react under extreme pressure. Despite their differences, Mark Twain and Stephan Crane were both very distinguished authors of their time and still are today.

WK 6 The Confidence Man

I really enjoyed Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. It was interesting to read his different stories on the different shapes that the "Confidence Man" or Con man could take on. It was a very interesting way to get people to see and then laugh at their faults so hopefully they would change them. In The Confidence Man, Melville is basically mocking the people and trying to show them the ridiculousness of their ways so that they will change them. This enlightenment period in which Herman Melville wrote outlined how in America there was a customary desire to see beyond people's general faults and put tremendous confidence in the political system and in America as a place for positive things. Melville shares an idea with Hawthorne that human nature is more complex than the happiness or Utopian notion. Melville's The Confidence Man is very different from many other novels in the sense that it is not a plot or character driven novel at all. Instead each chapter has a new twist and it is a series of philosophical sketches that present a new scenario and a new confidence man. But an interesting question to think about is whether or not Melville expects the reader to see the changes in characters as we would normally see in other novels.

WK 5 Angelina E. Grimke

Angelina Grimke was originally a southerner but was not in favor of slavery. She writes about how women go about being against slavery when their husbands are the ones that make the laws and enforce the slavery. For her it was an ongoing struggle for civil rights, not just for blacks but for women as well. On page 759 of the Norton Anthology Vol. 1, Grimke describes what she thinks the Christianized manner of character should look like for a woman. Grimke describes a typical womans claim or excuse when women are asked to stand against the things that they know are wrong; that they can't do anything to overthrow the system. "To this [she] replies, [she] knows you do not make the laws, but [she] also knows that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters, of those who do; and if you really suppose you can do nothing to overthrow slabvery, you are greatly mistaken." In Grimke's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, she fights hard for the claim that women can do something about the mistreatment of the black slaves. Grimke challenges other women to stand up against their husbands- to take their rights in their own hands. She is a powerful speaker/writer that addresses many issues that were still a big deal even 100 years later.

Wk 4 Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was an author who was attempting to create an American self and synthesize the "American exceptionalism." He represents a powerful spokesperson for the self, that is for feeling good about one's self, but a self that is not overly idealistic but that is good and bad. Especially in "One's Self I Sing," Whitman was trying to create a way to look at the world. In "Spontaneous Me," Whitman makes a bold step as a writer in that he celebrates physical love. Whitman does this more so than any other writer of his time. An example is on pg. 1056 of the Norton Anthology Vol. 1, "Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor... Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts of love, bellies press'd and glued together with love." Walt Whitman's goal, like Thorough and Emerson, was to wake up the living to do things that are only achieved through the body and mind and he did this through concrete things of the world and thoughts in his writing. Also in his writings he talks a lot about work but finishes it off with the importances of leaisure as well.

Wk. 2 Benjamin Franklin & his writing on Native Americans

Benjamin Franklin depicts an interesting concept in his writing of "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America," that from their perspective, maybe the white people are actually the savages, not them. Just because they didn't have guns or as technically advanced of a society we automatically assumed that they were savages. He also talks about the idea of the "noble savage," that what is "civilized is natural." In the beginning of the settling of America the natural world was both beautiful but also threatening. I think it was the simple, easy, naturalness of these Native Americans that made the settlers feel threatened. After reading Franklin's autobiography and some of his works, Franklin seems to me to be the modern day version of Oprah.

Wk. 3 American Romanticism

My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Rip Van Winkle were actually kind of similar in the sense that the main characters were still exploring and attempting to define what it means to be an American. In Major Molineux a young boy tries to find his kinsman that lives in a big town in hopes that Molineux will bring him up into society. Major Molineux and Rip Van Winkle both have strong reservation of the 'brave new world' that is America. These reservations that Hawthorne and Irving write about tie in to the developing Romanticism of the time period. It was a period of transition from Gothic to Transcendentalism. Where the Gothic view is a response to the emphasis on reason and human nature (the thought that all humans are sinners) and Transcendentalism is a sort of idealism. Hawthorne shows very strong writing in the romance tradition in his Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark. I found The Birthmark very intriguing because of Hawthorne's tie in of the Romance between a man and a woman, but also the man's essential need for his wife to be absolutly perfect that he kills her. It is a good example of a representation of the American Romanticism- that these new Americans see the world in a new way and it must be free and perfect for them because they are Americans.

Avatar- Study of Amer. Society

Avatar is a great representation of a comparision of societies. It takes the "American Dream" to a whole new level and basically turns it on another society. The Americans have started trying to take over a foreign planet, taking Manifest Destiny too far. The "American Dream" part of it is that all of these people want to take part in researching and discovering this new land and people. Everyone can't wait to get their hands on it because of the huge profit they can potentially recieve; they just want to get rich! The film also made light of some different American cultural values. I enjoyed watching Jake Sulley assimilate into the new society. It was a society of peace without guns and huge weaponry of mass destruction. Jake relearns the value of such trivial and easy parts of life that in American society are often forgotten about. American society has based itself of freedom of the people and being a democracy, but in Avatar, America's history with the 'Indians' (Native Americans) repeats itself. Clouded by their own visions, greed, and perception that because they are American they can have whatever they want, the men leading the project catagorize the Avatar society as being savage and primitive when they actually are a very advanced society, they just have no need for guns and computers. The film did a good job of helping the viewer to take a step back to realize that people value different things more or less than ourselves and people need to be considerate of culture differences at all times, no matter what race or society they are from.