Modernism

uring the beginning of 20^th century, modernism began to appear that people began a different movement from realism or romanticism. Different from other movement, modernism take bold experimentation in style and forms that it reject traditional theme such as romantic drawing or story. People start to view the world with new way of thinking that they reject sentimentality or artificiality. Instead of liking romantic hero who is ultimately strong and perfect, modernism favors hero who is flawed and disillusioned yet shows grace under these pressure and in the end develop into a strong character.  Modernistic literature revolves around the themes of individualism and how government, religion or other institution lied and oppressive individual expression. Some of the famous Modernist artist such as Picasso abandoned traditional thinking and conventional belief and draw painting with people whose has eyes on only 1 side of the head. Different from Romanticism, Modernism examines ordinary subject matter and interested in the inner workings of human minds. Different from Realism, Modernism introduce concept such as disjointed timeline where a story doesn’t necessary follow a linear strict chronological order that story and events may just pop out randomnly like how people recall their memory. Modernism experiment on novel ideas and style that don’t necessary are comprehensible to people when they first see it. 

American Dream

“America is a land of beauty, bounty and unlimited promises.” American dream is the basis that form American’s mind that America is a place of possibility and future. There are basically 3 parts of American dream: Land of future, progress and individual. With American dream, people believed that America is where everything becomes possible that there is no such thing as impossible. People that used to be oppressed and prosecuted in their old country are able to start fresh like a new person in America without having your past hunting you. People are so optimistic that they believe that in America, life will only get better and better that the world is going to move into an era of greater joy, justice and wealth. Also they triumph individual that they believe everything is possible for people who place trust in his or her own power and potential. They believe that individual will make a world a better place with democratic society where everyone’s opinion matters. However as modern era began, they realized that nothing is always 100 percent perfect that within a system there will be flaws and dilemma. Slavery is one of the problem that caused American Dream to be questioned. 

Better Things?

As Willa Cather had said, “Men travel faster, but I do not know if they go to better things.” As technology and the world changes, the dilemma of the modern age begins to rise to the surface. Should we sacrifice the rain forest and other natural resources for better technology and human living places? Should we abandon civilization and embrace nature in order to protect the world? There are tons of dilemmas we are facing in the world today. “No sacrifice, no victory.” In order to gain, we have to sacrifice some other things. However, is the sacrifice necessary in order for us to gain the benefit? Is it possible to gain without losing values alone with it? It is incredibly hard to reach a compromise that neither too much is lost or too less is gain. As some people believed, our society is improving when technology such as cars or internet develop. However, as we develop faster transportation, there are more death caused by car accident and leaks of private information due to insecurity in internet network. I believe as our society improves, more issues came along with it. In order to solve this dilemma, we should overcome the difficulties and come to a compromise so that neither side will be affected greatly.  

On impulse

Everyone has impulses, a drive, for them to do certain things, which can be “good” or “bad” thing. Most of the time, people can control themselves on whether or not they should actually act on their impulses. However, when people can’t control their instinctual impulses, most of the time their behaviors get them into troubles and legal issues. One classical example of impulses now a day for teenagers is the impulse to go on face book. We all know how facebook is interactive that it brings entertainment and social connection between people. People can chat, comment on people’s updates and picture and play games on face book. However, often times, facebook is like a maze that often times we got trap in it before knowing that we have wasted more than 2 hours surfing through people’s profiles and picture online. For example, when you see a new e-mail saying that blah blah has commented something on your picture, you will want to log into facebook and check out the message. However, your inner-self keeps telling you to ignore the mail because you may spend more than 2 hours online. However, the impulse is so great that you tell yourself that you will only spend no more than 5 minutes on it. Once you log in, new message keep popping out one after another on facebook that you couldn’t go offline. Once 2 hours pass, you regretted that you have once again fall into the trap of impulse.

Romantics VS Realists

The main difference between romantics and realists is that the romantics are idealistic and realists are realistic. The romantics believe that people can find truth and tranquility in supernatural, imaginative inner world. They tend to escape reality to an idealistic world where everyone lives happily and the evils are always defeated by the good. Probably these romantics want to avoid the sadness and pain of the world. On the other hand, realistic stay true and embrace reality. In their novels or poems, realists portray ordinary common things using everyday speech and stay true to reality without being pessimistic or optimistic of the world. They tend to just portray everyday life as true as possible without taking sides. Realists avoided heroes or extreme villains portray in dark romantic’s novels. Romantics writing tend to be filled with emotions where the events are extreme to both end that they can be extremely optimistic or pessimistic. As mention earlier in previous blog, the emergence of realism in America is mainly due the American civil war where writers discover that they can no longer portray the world as idealistic as before. Facing all the violence and ambivalence of evil or good, writer decides to portray the world they see with realistic perspective. 

Think About

As civil war progress, American writers and poets responded to it by writing novels and poems that portray on the realistic aspect of the war. At about 1865, when the civil war ended, the American realism began to spread that writers abandoned their romantic values of the world which portray romantic heroes and events. One of the most representative novels of the civil war, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane portrays a regular rookie soldier who experiences extreme terror in the war. Instead of depicting how heroic the protagonist is and the glorious victory of the battle, Stephan Crane portray soldier’s one victory of a battle is so insignificant to the overall war effort that realistic portray the cruelty of war and people’s nature fear of death during battle. One of the aspect of Realism writing is the used of common, everyday speech pattern to show how people really talk instead of florid and ostentatious speech. Aside from Realism, naturalism became to come about at the same time. Different from realism, naturalism forces on the philosophical aspect of the world. Realism tends to portray an event and situation where as naturalism shows how human are powerless in controlling their own fate and destinies that everything is determined by environment or genes.   

You've Come A Long Way, baby

As a twentieth century teenager, we tend to accept and assume that all man and woman are equal and received similar privileges. However, only when we look back at history, we can see that women have only received these rights for less than 60 years. Women throughout human history are usually inferior to man both physically and mentally. Women were discriminated and treated as if a property of man. Women were born to do house choirs and forbidden to get educated. Women merely serve as a servant for man and a reproductive tool for society. In many cultures, male tends to be in favor over female in family that only man can prove useful and be successful. For example, King George once killed over 6 of his wives just because they can’t give him a male successor. Male tends to be the dominator of the world and expected to do better than women. With such expectation, women tend to accept themselves as inferior to men and perform laboring jobs. Only until recently in the late 1900s those women begin to be able to take man’s job and have voting right and the right to express their opinion. Even though in many countries such as Congo and some other African countries women are still treated unfairly, our world begins to work toward our goal of equality.

A Reprieve

From time to time, I felt myself to be living in a set routine of cycle that often bores me out and drives me crazy. Everyday seems the same to me, without any major differences between each day. I would always wake up 7 in the morning, feeling tired and get dressed for school at 8. Then I will have class and eat lunch at 11. After lunch, I will have more class till 3 and I will either stay at school for team sports or go home and sleep. Then I will eat my dinner at 6 and watch some TV till 7:30. After 7:30, I usually take a nap if I didn’t do so at 3 and then start doing my homework at about 9. After homework, I will take a shower and go to sleep at about 12. My life is boring and mundane. Nothing really special will ever happen. To break away from this seemly boring schedule, I will some time allow myself to have time to relax such as chatting with friends on messenger or doing some exercise such as playing basketball or tennis with my friend. People always say that being student is the easiest period in life, but for me, being student is no necessary that fun. 

A Change of Heart

During the romantic period, people were idealistic and have optimistic view of everything they sees. They portray romantic heroes, who fought for justice and save the beauty after defeating the bad guys. The heroes were all selfless and brave. However as we move on to the next period after the civil war, people’s view begins to change. Realism begins to rise that people stop being idealistic and think about the present instead of the bright optimistic future. Poets and thinkers started to realize the cruel reality of the world. They viewed civil war as a bloody and merciless battle between brothers instead of victorious battle against one another. As shown on the painting, it illustrated the after math of a seemingly battle at a forte. As the evening approach with the sun setting, we can see that only a single survivor seems to live through the battle holding a torn flag up high on a forte. Ruins of cannons, walls and mud covered the background, showing the ugliness of war. This painting is an excellent example in showing how Americans started to shift into realism, realizing that war don’t tends to be as heroic as many books portrayed. We live in a cruel world that many things tend to turn out to be negative.

I exist

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” This quote from Stephan Crane shows how human is so insignificant compare to the whole universe. Americans during the Romanticism were extremely optimistic and cheerful. Since their victorious Independence war, they think of themselves as unstoppable and a strong nation. People were idealistic and thinking the future was bright and clear for them. Only until the American Civil War come around about in 1850s that Americans started to realize that their nation which they are so proud of being democratic and fair was instead filled with racism and slavery. Due to whether to abolish slavery or keep it to continue America’s economic strength, Americans divided themselves into the North and South, which broke out to be a bloody battle that Americans were faced to kill their own brothers. This poem portrays a feeling that American may be so proud of themselves that they are independent from Great Britain and create the first democratic government. Yet, the world doesn’t really care about their existence that compare to the universe and the whole galaxy, humans are really nothing. 

Power

The power relationship in The Handmaid’s Tale seems easy to tell that the commander is on the highest level of control, then wives, Martha, Handmaids and the unwomen. For example, the commander is the fearsome man who controls everything in the household and holds absolute power. However as we look deeper into the story, we find that maybe commander doesn’t necessary always held the most power. In a secret relationship between commander and Offred, the handmaid, even the commander himself is afraid of the relationship to be discovered by his wife. If the commander really does obtain absolute power, the commander can possibly do anything one wants to do, such as loving the handmaid as a secret wife and wanting to do anything he wanted to do in the household. However, there are still limits to the power. The wives tend to be the second in line for power that they control the Martha and the handmaids. They can order the handmaid like a slave to do whatever she wants to do. However, they are somewhat in some way inferior to the handmaid that they are unable to have love with their husband and force to see their lovers making love with a stranger. They are like old ladies who are jealous of these young handmaids.

Slanted truth

“Tell all the truth, tell it slant. Truth must not be given all at once raw, for they may come as a tremendous surprise like lightning to an innocent child.” I agree that for some truth, such as the reason for your brother’s death or the truth of your parent may sometime need to be given little by little, so we can take it in bits by bits without getting overwhelmed by the surprising truth at once. This kind of slanted truth is not a lie, which one is still telling the truth, except not a whole truth. One may want to know the whole truth at once because one thinks he or she can take it in and absorb it. However, most people with a fainted heart may be unable to take such a shock all at once and result in mental breakdown. Truth such as telling a person that you are adopted may be hard to understand for kids. Often time the truth may be misunderstood that the person can’t absorb the whole truth and missed some of the truth. I personally agree with Dickinson’s point of view. Some truths are incapable to be delivered and understand all at once. The best way is to take your time and say it indirectly so that your subject won’t die before you are finished telling the truth. 

Pessimism

Why is Emily Dickenson so pessimistic that she wrote poems with topic such as death, loneliness and isolation? Given her background story and personality as a recluse who may have faced emotional obstacles, we can probably why Emily will be such an unhappy person. Emily Dickenson may feel that she has no personal control of her life. There is nothing she can do to help her to get the man she wanted and compensate her emptiness in her heart. People may attribute that Dickenson may just enjoy being a recluse because she naturally is an introverted person who feels uncomfortable with people’s presence. However, this is definitely a wrong assumption that she hated to be so lonely so that’s why she wrote so many poem about death and isolation to relieve her feelings, wanting to communicate and share some of her feelings to the rest of the world. The author of the book The Handmaid’s Tale is actually kind of pessimistic too. In the book, she portrays a future world where woman’s rights have been taken away and oppressed by man. Being a feminist, the author wanted to show the world that this kind of future should be avoided that man and woman should share equal rights.